A Gentleman's Game
by Nookienostradamus
Summary: Stumbling blindly in the snowy woods out back of Will Graham's house, Frederick Chilton is bitten by one of Will's dogs. Only it isn't one of Will's dogs. The incident marks the start of a strange and exhilarating transformation that might just give Frederick the opportunity for the revenge on Hannibal that he so-ahem-doggedly pursues.
1. Chapter 1

"A gentleman is simply a patient wolf." - Lana Turner

"_Homo homini lupus_" ("_Man is wolf to man_") - Roman proverb

He knew who was chasing him and he knew why, but by that point his hindbrain had taken over. When it came down to brass tacks, he was half a percent fight at most. The rest was flight. Cowardice, he rationalized, was the trade-off for a splendid intellect.

It was something he would resent when looking back, when he conducted a self-analysis that wasn't actually analysis at all but a superficial indulgence in blaming circumstance.

Whether or not it reflected on his practice, Frederick Chilton sucked at introspection.

That there might not be time for looking back, of course, didn't occur to him at that point. Not with the deafening neurochemical shout: _Run run run run run run…_

His dragging footsteps were muffled by the heavy snow. So, he had to assume, were Jack Crawford's.

_This isn't fair_, he thought, skidding down a short embankment on the heels of his Napa leather Tod's driving loafers. _I'm a cripple_. The coherent thought stopped him in his tracks, quite literally.

Ah, so he didn't even have to wait until the aftermath for the blame to start. Funny the things the brain conjures when you're about to die. The senses go into overdrive, which is good.

Their evil cousin, imagination, also turns up the heat. That wasn't nearly as great. Every naked tree branch against his face was a bullet whizzing by. Every burning faceful of snow was the splash of blood from his blown-out skull. With an entry wound to the back of the head, would the exit pop his eyes whole from their sockets? The last things he'd see would be snow and roots and pieces of his own face. Like looking at a mirror turned into a kaleidoscope. The sudden and vivid image made him gag.

Instead of doubling over and vomiting, Frederick started running again. He had zero doubt that, given the chance, Crawford would shoot him down like a dog.

That was a painful cliché, but it had probably occurred to him because of the dog. A _real_ dog. A big, gray one, standing off to the side between two tree trunks like it was just popping its head out the door to watch this staggering, panting wreck of a man go by. _Voyeur_. Frederick didn't trust animals because he couldn't tell exactly how much they saw.

He didn't trust people for the same reason.

Though Frederick had other things on his mind while scrambling up the far side of the embankment-namely the smell of blood that still hung on him even after scrubbing himself raw in Will Graham's shower-he couldn't remember seeing this particular brute among Graham's pack. For one thing, it was huge, with the rangy, long-legged appearance of a wild dog. Maybe it was one of those wolf half-breeds, though Frederick couldn't imagine even Graham would be stupid enough to take in something so volatile. To be fair, though, Will had flirted with sheer idiocy in letting Hannibal Lecter into close confidence. But the fact of it made Frederick an idiot by association and that wasn't something he wanted to dwell on.

_Maybe it was part coyote. Were there coyotes in Virginia?_

The dog-coyote-wolf-thing cocked its head, its ears swiveling in Frederick's direction. Its pale blue marble eyes, set in a mask of lighter gray fur, projected a semblance of unsettling self-awareness. Once again, Frederick felt sure he would have seen such a singular animal back at the house. Yet it must have been there, sniffing at him in a predator's ecstasy but too tame to act on its instinct.

Frederick would never discount instinct again.

The dog opened its mouth in a canine grin, huffing out a cloud of steam into the frigid air. Tongue lolling, it started padding out of the thicket on huge paws. It got bigger every time Frederick looked at it. Seemed it wasn't content with only watching.

Frederick's already overtaxed adrenal glands managed to double the output when the dog stopped abruptly in its tracks then drew back its lips and snarled. With his panic-heightened eyesight, he could see its throat vibrating.

Running past it was the only option, because Frederick couldn't head back toward the house. Toward Jack Crawford. Or, rather, the eerie snowbound silence where he knew Crawford waited.

The dog watched him, still growling, swiveling its head as he changed direction and skirted the thicket to his right. His toe caught in a snarl of fallen branches and he went down hard on one knee, losing a loafer in the process of extricating himself.

At that moment it occurred to him that the last thing he might think in his life was: _Damn you and your dogs, Will Graham_. It sounded like something a comic book supervillain would say while shaking a fist at the sky. For the time being, though, Frederick Chilton was a supervillain. At least according to the FBI. How much more depraved could one get than the Chesapeake Ripper?

For the first and arguably the stupidest time since the frame job went down, Frederick laughed. He laughed about it all, wheezing and weeping and stumbling to the point that he couldn't run anymore.

Unfortunately, the whole display seemed to wind the dog up even more. Every time it took a breath, the growl came in with a high-pitched whine at the top. Its lips rose and fell like malfunctioning stage curtains over its huge fence-picket teeth. Some part of Frederick thought it might be better if Jack came along and shot him. It was preferable to being gutted (or to witnessing the ugly demise of his Burberry peacoat).

The dog crouched, its haunches quivering, preparing to leap.

Frederick stopped laughing and stared, drawing freezing sips of air into his lungs.

_Come on, hindbrain, don't fail me now_.

It didn't. He fainted into the snow.

For the third time in a year, Frederick woke up smelling blood. _Congratulations, Dr. Chilton. You have won the Triple Crown of Mutilation. You get a wreath of entrails._

Because of the smell, he expected pain, but there was none. He tried to open his eyes and failed for a panicked second before he realized that his eyelids were frozen shut. The frosty trails that wound through the miniature forest of his five o'clock shadow were old tears. New ones-not of fear but of relief-flooded in and thawed his stuck lids.

The cold let him know that he was alive. Either that or it had literally snowed in Hell, but at that moment Frederick chose the most orthodox atheism possible to reassure himself he was still breathing. A second later, there it came: the breath that stung his ravaged throat and made his teeth ache.

He let go and sobbed like a child-just a couple of hiccuping convulsions and plenty of fresh, hot tears before humiliation crept up on him. He sniffled hard and pulled a sizable quantity of snot back into his sinuses. Cold air came with it, and he started tearing up again.

Finally, he was able to open his eyes and got a couple of blinks in the white, waning afternoon before something frigid and rubbery thumped down on his forehead. He tried to move his hand to lift the offending object, then it dawned on him that it _was_ his hand, stiff and numb with cold.

His coat sleeve was missing, his entire forearm bare and bluish. At least he wasn't so rusty in his diagnostic skills that he didn't think to check for frostbite. A couple of fingertips looked white, but there was no blackening yet. Frederick sighed his relief. He would rather not lose yet another body part. Strangely, there didn't appear to be any bite marks or scratches. The skin was unblemished.

But the blood had to have come from somewhere. It was all over his coat front, and freezing in cubist rock-candy crystals on the tatters of his shirt sleeve. The dog might have been injured. Maybe it thought he was trying to harm it, that the defensive growls had been the last resort of a dying animal.

Or maybe he'd killed the dog himself. Why not? There were stories of mothers _in extremis_ lifting two-ton cars to reach trapped children. Frederick could have gone berserk in a self-preserving rage and torn out the beast's throat. He clung hard to the idea because it meant he'd done something exceptional, even if he didn't remember it.

The warm little kernel began to flower inside him, raising hesitant tendrils. Frederick would rather be publicly flogged than admit to the fact that, deep down, he was a bit of a fantasist. While he loathed the lies that people told themselves, he had a soft spot for the lies people told each other: fables, myths, tales, outlandish explanations straddling the line between feasible and ridiculous. He'd spent many a frigid winter evening during his medical residency sneaking looks at his volume of Bulfinch's Greek Mythology or the _Prose Edda_ or the _Táin Bó Cúailnge_ behind his clipboard.

Frederick, a small and weak child who'd grown into a small and weak man, nevertheless let his mind thrill to the exploits of Beowulf or Cú Chulainn. Anger, pain, fear: they all did things to men, transformed them. Frederick wanted to believe this time that for an instant he'd tapped into a vein of rage deep inside himself-if not godlike then at least elevated-and saved his own life.

But wouldn't the dog's mangled body be lying somewhere close? Frederick frowned. Maybe it had gone after Jack Crawford instead. The man had been only a few paces behind him, gaining all the while on Frederick's limping run. Maybe it was the dog that had saved _his_ life. If so, he owed thanks, if indirectly, to Will Graham, though he didn't savor the idea of having to say it out loud.

Fighting the vertiginous lurch his brain gave in his skull, Frederick sat up and looked at the deep red puddle that had spread into the snow. The blood had already re-frozen on the ground, but it beaded and ran on his rapidly warming flesh. Outside of that, everything else was white. White and silent.

He took a breath, then another, trying to put off the embarrassing moment when he'd try to stand up. _Here's your wolf-pelted warrior, Odin. A gimp on a cane._

Frederick looked around for said cane. Silly, considering he'd left it in Graham's parlor (or what passed for one in that rustic hellhole). The painful tingling in his limbs reinforced the fact that he couldn't just sit there mired in blood and disappointment. Hands braced on the ground behind his back, he pushed his weight forward, but his feet were still too anesthetized from the cold to bear weight and he thumped back hard on his ass, cursing.

A branch snapped nearby with a brittle click and Frederick went still, holding his breath.

"Dr. Chilton!"

It was Will Graham's voice. The panic engine inside Frederick's chest thrummed to life again. "No," he said, softly but firmly.

"Dr. Chilton!"

Frederick struggled to find the balance to get to his feet, confused for only a moment before realizing he was already standing. His legs were tensed, his abdomen pain-free thanks to renewed adrenaline. He was ready to run.

Graham's head in a foolish-looking hunter's cap crested the snowbank.

Hesitating a second too long while deciding if his insides could take another dash, Frederick finally just put his hands up, fighting back tears as Graham approached. "Please," he breathed, the self-disgust manifest in a cloud on the freezing air. "Please."

"I'm not going to hurt you," Graham said, mirroring Frederick and raising his own gloved hands.

"Where's Crawford?" Frederick asked him.

"Gone," said Graham. "I promise."

"You'll have to forgive me if I don't trust your promises, Mr. Graham," said Frederick, his heartbeat still loud in his ears. He sniffed. "Jack Crawford doesn't just give up."

"He didn't give up. I persuaded him to stop," Graham said. "For the moment."

"You...wait-" Frederick said. "You sent one of your dogs after me. I'm sure it knew my scent. Did it bring part of my coat back as a souvenir?" He flapped his naked arm as punctuation.

Graham stepped closer. He looked confused. "All of my dogs are at the house."

"Well, there was a dog here," Frederick said, feeling a little like a child trying to will an imaginary friend into existence. "A gray one. _Huge_."

"Then it wasn't one of mine," Graham said.

"Oh, great," said Frederick, mostly to himself, thinking about the painful series of rabies shots. Then again, it didn't even seem like any damage was done. He examined his arm again, smeared with whorls of bloody snow. _Nothing_.

"Are you hurt?"

"I-I don't know," Frederick said, blinking.

Graham took a step toward him. "Why don't you come back to the house?"

Frederick huffed out a brief, swirling cloud. "You must think I'm a moron," he said. "For all I know, Crawford is there waiting for me."

Graham's expression was patient, not at all telegraphing-as expected-that he, indeed, thought Frederick was a moron. "He's not." Graham took a breath. "Dr. Chilton, Jack broke his ankle. I heard it go. He wanted to keep chasing you but I made him stop. I practically had to drag him out of a gully. I would have been back here sooner but I had to wait for the ambulance."

Relief flooded Frederick's body in a wash from his scalp downward. The spike of adrenaline spooled into a giddy euphoria. He raised watering eyes to the dull, gray sky, then let them fall closed.

"If they bring a team of bloodhounds back here, they'll find your scent," Graham said. "So I suggest you come with me."

Frederick wiped his streaming eyes, ran the back of his hand under his nose. "Why do you care what happens to me? You were the one who called Jack in the first place."

Graham paused, his brow furrowed. "I had a change of heart. At first I thought you'd be safer in prison, but I realized he can get in almost anywhere he wants."

"Lecter," said Frederick.

"Yes," said Graham. "The Chesapeake Ripper."

"Thank God," Frederick said.

"I know it wasn't you," said Graham. "Even though you thought it was me. I don't hold unproductive grudges, Dr. Chilton."

"I do," Frederick said. "I'm going to see that son-of-a-bitch go down."

Graham raised his eyebrows, as if impressed by the sentiment. "I want the same thing you do," he told Frederick, "but don't let Hannibal in your mind. That's why I decided to help you hide." Graham tapped his temple twice with his forefinger. "This is the only place he can't go. Not anymore."

Frederick nodded and sniffed, drawing the back of his hand under his nose. It came away unpleasantly sticky.

"Are you going to come with me?" Graham extended one hand. "Hypothermia will set in soon, if it hasn't already."

"I know," Frederick said. "Once again, I'm not an idiot." He brushed snow from his clothes, trying and failing to hide his sudden exasperation. "I had to know it was safe."

To his surprise, Will Graham smiled. "If you're waiting for safety, Dr. Chilton, you're going to freeze to death."

Frederick clenched his teeth but said nothing.

Graham turned to head back to the cabin, but stopped and looked back. "You should probably leave your coat," he said. "To throw them off."

"Apparently you _do_ want me to freeze to death," said Frederick.

"It won't be long," said Graham. "You didn't get as far as you think you did."

Frederick ground his teeth. "I'm not sure I got anywhere at all."

Graham turned fully around to face him. "Out of the frying pan, into the fire," he said, without a trace of irony. Then he grinned. "You could always leave your pants."

Frederick gave an indignant huff, but peeled off the bloody coat and dropped it where he had lain. Clutching himself, he followed Graham back in the direction of his cabin. He was shivering so hard he could barely see when he reached the front porch, and the exertion melted the ice down the back of his trouser legs, where the biting wind promptly re-froze it to his skin. Graham's dogs spilled out in a warm tide of swishing tails and snuffling noses. They poked their snouts up into his crotch, where his balls were drawn in so tight against the cold that it hurt.

There on the threshold, assaulted by indecorous mutts, Frederick figured that it couldn't get much worse.

As it turned out, it could.


	2. Chapter 2

At least the bed was warm, if the mattress was a bit lacking. Frederick rolled over, clutching the quilt to his chest against the cold and luxuriating in the feel of the silk pajamas he'd had the forethought to pack.

He couldn't really force himself to feel badly about the fact that Graham had spent the night on his lumpy couch. For all that their shared experiences-namely treachery at the hands of Hannibal Lecter-Frederick just did not _like_ Will Graham. He was rough, provincial. His house reeked of dog, his kitchen of microwave meals. More than that, the man was an open wound, bleeding his frankly creepy empathy in smears all over the people in his periphery. Will Graham was the human equivalent of Frederick's corpse-strewn house.

The returning thought of his _sanctum sanctorum_ so invaded made Frederick grumpy. The peevishness, like the pajamas, was a luxury-one that, during his ordeal in the snow-strewn wilderness, he never thought he'd be able to experience again. He contemplated staying in bed all day in celebration.

There was a rich smell drifting up from downstairs, though, and his stomach had begun to complain. Frederick tried to quiet it by telling himself the food on offer was probably some pre-packaged dreck but he went from interested to ravenous faster than he would have thought possible. His gut actually _cramped_ with want when he heard the sizzling crescendo of something hitting a hot pan.

Of course he hadn't thought to bring slippers, and the uneven wood floor was cold. He hopped around in discomfort for a moment, trying to pry a pair of cashmere socks from the overnight bag. Frederick couldn't believe he'd thought such a tiny kit would be sufficient after fleeing to Europe (the option was still tempting but not viable; the FBI had probably frozen his bank accounts), but he'd been distracted by haste and terror. As for cash, he had about four hundred or so, most of which would have to be dropped on food and clothes. The thought of relying entirely on Will Graham's hospitality _or_ his wardrobe was repellent.

Frederick's stomach, evidently less discerning than his brain, reminded him with a loud grumble that a meal was on offer. He opened the bedroom door expecting to wade through a rippling tide of dogs, but the hallway was clear. One of these days he'd end up kicking one of the smaller dogs, possibly not by accident. Especially since he'd already started to think of his stay at Graham's place in terms of days rather than hours.

How long would it take to clear his name? Weeks? _Months?_ In the interim, Crawford would come back, sniffing around, busted ankle or no. The fact that Will had called him in the first place could possibly be enough to throw him off the scent for a while, but the BAU chief would no doubt be in this house again, forcing Frederick to cower in a closet or underneath the bed. It was awful enough a prospect that he pushed the idea away. Or it could have been shoved out by the aromas floating up from downstairs. His stomach gave another growl. He raised a hand and patted the slight bulge of his belly. Frederick wasn't sure he'd ever been this hungry in his life.

_Nothing works up an appetite like dodging bullets after being framed for grisly crimes._ The sudden surge of hatred for Hannibal Lecter hit Frederick so hard it made him dizzy. Leaning against the door frame, the notion crossed his mind that he might be better off just killing himself. It was a desperation-fueled thought experiment and would go no further than that; Frederick knew he didn't have the sack for suicide. That, of course, begged the question of whether he had the balls to keep living. Hiding like a rat or sucking on a shotgun: both of them were untenable, so his mind settled on a sort of in-between.

_Schrödinger's Chilton._

He laughed, possibly out loud, then a knotting pang bent him almost double, as if his body was protesting the humor. It protested everything this morning. The hunger was in the driver's seat. The hunger was paramount.

Trying to move quietly on the old, creaking boards, Frederick made his way down the hall. In his famished haze, he failed to realize he'd left his cane, unneeded, in the bedroom.

Graham was standing at the small gas stove in a t-shirt and a pair of ragged flannel pants. He was wielding a pitted and burned spatula that looked like it came straight out of a rummage sale. Frederick tried to muster disdain, but his gaze was drawn to the plate of crisp bacon on the counter at Graham's elbow.

The combined scent and idea of it made Frederick's mouth water so copiously he had to swallow twice before he could even think of speaking.

Graham beat him to the punch without even turning around. "There's coffee if you want it." he gestured to the table, where two mugs sat next to a dented carafe.

With Frederick's luck it was instant. Or one of those awful brands that came in a vacuum-sealed can.

Suddenly feeling self-conscious in his comparative finery, Frederick walked to the table and poured himself a steaming cup. To his surprise, it was full-bodied and smooth.

"Good, right?" Graham asked. He was acting like the two of them had roomed together for weeks, and it was unnerving at the very least. Graham turned away from the stove to fix Frederick with an unreadable gaze. "I learned a certain appreciation for high-end coffee from-" he started, then apologized. "Well, you know. Sore subject I'm sure."

Learned it from Hannibal, was what he was going to say.

"The good doctor's tastes certainly evoke a mixed response," Frederick said. "They're similar enough to mine to be unsettling."

"Look at it this way," Graham said, turning back to his work on the stove. Frederick took a burning gulp of coffee to quiet the tumult in his gut. "Hannibal duped me," Graham said, "and my tastes are just about at the opposite pole, generally speaking. I'm pretty sure he can dupe anyone."

Frederick raised his mug a couple of inches in a private salute, trying to fend off the returning crush of misery.

"Bacon?" Graham asked. "I promise it comes from a pig."

Frederick gagged on his coffee. "No." It was a prim, terse refusal. "If you'll remember, I can't digest animal proteins."

"Sorry," Graham said, not sounding very sorry at all. "Eggs?"

"That's still animal protein, Mr. Graham."

"Huh," Graham said, as if the fact that chickens produced eggs was news to him. "Might be dry toast for you, then."

Maybe this was payback for making him sleep on the couch.

Graham transferred the last of the dripping bacon onto the plate and went to open his old refrigerator.

On the counter, the plate of meat was beckoning. Frederick could almost see the waves of scent drifting upward from the crisp slices. He shut his eyes tight and put the lip of his coffee mug directly under his nose. If he gave in to temptation, he'd pay for it later.

"How did you sleep?" asked Graham.

"Like the dead," said Frederick, eyes still closed.

Graham's laugh startled him. Coffee splashed onto the formica tabletop. Frederick was briefly glad that it hadn't gone the other way, right into his lap.

"Nice to see you haven't lost your sense of humor," Graham told him, shutting the refrigerator door and moving to the cupboards. His movement wafted more of the bacon smell toward Frederick, who bit the inside of his cheek to keep from charging the countertop and shouldering Graham out of the way. "To be honest, I wasn't sure you had one," said Graham.

Frederick kept silent. He hadn't thought his answer was at all funny, but he figured it was better as a guest to be at least a little solicitous. Graham was awfully jovial. It seemed out of character-like he was concealing something and doing a poor job of it. Maybe it was the relief of not having to shoulder the burden of the Ripper's crimes anymore. He could sit across the table from the current scapegoat and know he was safe.

The idea left a sour taste in Frederick's mouth. "Why are you helping me?" he asked.

To his surprise, Graham stopped, a can of baked beans in his hand. It was as if he had never expected the question to arise. For a second, Frederick thought Graham might be playing dumb, then he sighed, paused again, and set the can on the counter. "I'm not sure I am," he said. "Helping, I mean."

Frederick's hand began to tremble, and he put the mug of coffee down. The weakness of his own voice disgusted him. "If you'd be so good as to refrain from calling Jack Crawford, I'd consider that 'helping.'"

"No," Graham said, "I'm not going to call Jack again. Whatever is going to happen, I think you have a part in it. It's just a feeling, really."

"So you don't have a plan?" Frederick asked.

Will laughed again. This time the sound was imbued with considerably less humor. "To take Hannibal down? Expose him for what he is? No. I don't. Not as such." He pulled a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread from the breadbox and removed two slices from the bag.

Frederick tried to fight back the rising tide of hopelessness.

Giving the free end of the plastic bag a ferocious twist before shoving the loaf back into the breadbox, Graham spoke again. "But what he did to you set something in motion. Back when it was just me-when I was the only one who knew what Hannibal was-I was stuck. He put me in a cage, literally and figuratively."

Taking another swig of the coffee, Frederick concentrated on his anger at Hannibal Lecter rather than on Graham's words. He'd been the keeper of that cage, but it was much easier to salve his battered ego by telling himself he'd been conned by Hannibal than to admit he'd been, independent of circumstance, utterly wrong in his diagnosis of Will Graham.

"But the cage he made is only big enough for one," Graham continued. "Putting you in my place-or trying-means I'm out of the cage now." A soft, metallic clanging signaled that Graham had put the bread slices into his ancient toaster.

The yeasty smell of warming bread twined with the scent of bacon and Frederick pressed a fist against his stomach to stop its loud griping. "And I'm in it, whether it's at my hospital or not," he said.

Graham inclined his head, though whether it was in sympathy or in agreement Frederick couldn't tell. "As smart as Hannibal is, he's not supernatural," Graham said. "He sees his interactions with me, with the BAU, as a puppet show, but he doesn't hold all of the strings. One day, he'll make a mistake."

"I'm supposed to wait around for that day?" Frederick asked. "Living in limbo?"

"You're not in limbo," said Graham. "Limbo is uncertainty. You're one of two people who's seen Hannibal's true face, and that's put you on firmer ground than almost anyone."

"You know," said Frederick, "you talk like he does. All those heavy-handed metaphors." As for himself, Frederick liked to keep his language pragmatic, neutral. Verbal flourishes and grandiosities functioned as tiny windows into a personality. While he henpecked them in his patients, he eschewed them himself, aware that the slightest allusion could provide a portal to his rich inner mythos. The fact that in this mythos he was indubitably the star player was also something to keep guarded from prying minds. By contrast, Hannibal dangled his own myths like a hypnotist's pendulum. He oozed excess just as distastefully as Graham did.

"I take on characteristics of those I analyze," Graham said, lapsing into obvious shrink-speak. "It's part of my _disorder_."

The statement betrayed a glimpse of the immense reservoir of bitterness Graham felt toward his former psychiatrist. Frederick grasped at that view and held it close. For once in longer than he cared to remember, he shared an emotional experience with another human being. Damned if he was going to give Graham a peek at that gratitude, though.

The thwack of the toaster jolted him out of his reverie. Graham had opened the can of beans. "I think it's also part of the plan, what little of it there is right now," he said.

"There was a time when we thought you took on some of Lecter's more…_singular_ characteristics." Adding Alana Bloom and Jack Crawford into the mix took some of the onus off of Frederick himself in the expansive mistake that was Will Graham's arrest and institutionalization.

Graham chuckled while he poured the sticky mass from the can over the slices of toast. "The argument for you as the Ripper is even more flimsy than for me. Pretentious habits are a poor substitute for disordered empathy in the evidence department."

That one stung. "I _have_ empathy," Frederick said, with no true credence behind the words. "It's just not-as you pointed out-_disordered_. And, may I remind you, they have physical evidence on the both of us."

The only thing Graham said was, "Mm-hmm." With his back turned, it was impossible to read his face.

"I don't suppose that cautioning you about getting close to Lecter once again would dissuade you," Frederick said.

"'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.'" Graham walked over with the plate and set it down in front of Frederick. His expression was as inscrutable as the back of his head had been. "Breakfast the English way."

"I'm merely saying that anyone observing this situation from the outside would tell you you're running _into_ the burning building." Frederick picked up his fork and poked at the beans, wrinkling his nose. "Not out of it."

"Hannibal has to see it that way," said Graham. "We need to make him believe he's in control."

"_We_?" Frederick set the fork down and pushed the plate away. "Oh, no, _no_, Mr. Graham. This is your show, puppet or otherwise. When I said that I wanted to see Hannibal brought down, I meant that I want to observe it from _very_ far away."

Graham shook his head. "It doesn't work that way, Dr. Chilton. You're involved whether you like it or not. I'm tempted to say you got involved the day I came into your hospital, if not before. You, me, Jack, Alana, everyone-we're stuck in this until it ends."

Frederick felt indignation rising, satisfied that it almost eclipsed the hunger still gnawing in his gut. "That's easy for you to say as someone who's not on the hook for his murders anymore," he said. "You could walk away right now and leave me hanging in the wind. Pack up your…_dogs_ and move to Florida or something. The proverbial sword of Damocles is no longer hanging over your head."

"'Sword of Damocles,' huh?" Graham asked, pinching a piece of the greasy bacon between his thumb and forefinger. Frederick watched the meat it as it moved to his lips, past them, into his mouth. It took a couple of seconds for him to remind himself to look away. If Graham noticed his blush, he didn't show it. "Bit of a mythology buff there, Dr. Chilton? You know, Hannibal's quite the fan as well."

"I am _nothing_ like Hannibal," he said. "And I am nothing like you. If you want an accomplice, Mr. Graham, you're looking at the wrong man. I'm not going to take on the Chesapeake Ripper, and I don't think its in your best interest to do so, either."

"There isn't a choice," Graham said, speaking around a mouthful of bacon. "Like I said before, you're part of this."

"I'm staying here out of necessity," said Frederick, "not because I approve of your methods or your lifestyle, or because I even _like_ you. You are a last resort."

"Oh, I'm aware that you don't like me, Dr. Chilton," said Graham. "It'll come as no surprise that I don't like you either." He smiled, picking up the plate of bacon. "But I'm not a last resort. I'm your _only_ resort. Keep your friends close...right?"

Frederick bit his lip, then let go with an exasperated sigh. "I believe I've lost my appetite."

"Understandable," Graham said, smiling. "Must be all these animal proteins." He raised the lid of the trash can by the sink and dumped the entire plate of cooked bacon into it.

Frederick had to hold back a whimper.

"I'm going to have a shower," said Graham, putting the empty dish in the sink. "You're more than welcome to take one afterward, though you may not want to. I'll need some help splitting wood this afternoon, and it's sweaty work."

Frederick's mouth dropped open. By the time he had the wherewithal to force sound out of it, Graham had left the kitchen.


	3. Chapter 3

Since he'd been unable (and, let's face it, unwilling) to eat the mess that Graham had "cooked" up for him, Frederick found himself excused from wood-chopping duty. It was no relief, though. The chore would take Graham at least a couple of hours-time in which he wouldn't be making the trek to the grocery store to procure something Frederick actually _could_ eat.

He stood under the surprisingly hot spray of Graham's shower for a good fifteen minutes, all the while trying not to consider a scenario in which boredom would cause him to go asking Graham for work around the house to stave off cabin fever. Did the man have any books in the place? Steadfast in his resolve not to pay attention to his dismal surroundings (there was a fishing rod in the umbrella stand for heaven's sake, its gossamer line drifting loose and spilling over the container's edge like a tiny flume), Frederick hadn't noticed. Graham didn't strike him as the type to read fiction, especially not after having recently lived through events that would make a blockbuster screenplay writer salivate. Frederick extended his bathing for a couple of additional minutes while pondering who might portray him in a film. Someone complex and subtle. Couldn't be a big name, but, Frederick reasoned, he had to have incredible range.

Perhaps he was only wishing for flexibility himself, considering that what was unfolding now was the sequel to Graham's tribulations. Maybe they needed a television series.

The shower had helped, but Frederick suspected he wouldn't feel human again until he was dressed in his own clothes. But when he'd managed to waddle, clutching a towel so thin and small it might have been lifted from a budget hotel room around his waist, back to the bedroom both of his bags were gone.

Laying on the bed, instead, were a pair of corduroys, a white undershirt, and a plaid work shirt. At least Graham had left his silk-blend Emporio Armani briefs. But the rest of it? No. Absolutely not.

"Graham!" he called. No answer. "Graham! Where are my things?"

After getting no response for a second time, Frederick tried to knot the towel tighter around his hips, cursing the bit of extra padding he'd put on while recuperating from Gideon's attack. He left the bedroom again and walked toward the front of the house.

The smell that still lingered in Will Graham's kitchen stopped him just as his bare feet touched the pitted linoleum. Instead of waning, it seemed as if the bacon-scent had only gotten stronger and more complex-a dark, gamey note with a certain caramelized sweetness layered over it. He shook his head. Dear God, listen to him thinking about cheap, grocery store bacon like it was cologne. Still, he found he couldn't make himself walk through the kitchen-past the trash can-into the living room to continue the search.

_Maybe I'll just_ look _at it._

Had Frederick ever been an addict, he would have recognized within his skull the siren song of the near-relapse. The closest he'd come to addiction was an unhealthy fascination with the dissociative identities section of the DSM-III in college. He'd read the section thirty times (and yes, he counted).

Tiptoeing even though no one else was in the house to hear, he crossed the short span to the waste bin. The dogs had to be outside with Graham, frolicking in the snow to the thunk of an axe, or they might long since have ferreted the discarded bacon out of the trash. The pastoral grotesquery of it all might have struck Frederick once again if he weren't so intent on other things.

He lifted the lid and the aroma that billowed out nearly caused him to drop it again-not from disgust but from ecstasy. There was now a sour undertone of rotting citrus rind winding around the smell, and it bloomed across Frederick's palate like a fireworks show.

Before he knew what he was doing, he had a piece of the bacon between his fingers.

_Maybe I'll just_ sniff _it._

He did, and the explosions were brighter and closer together. Lord have mercy. The rational part of Frederick's brain knew that if he took a single bite it could mean violent intestinal cramping and diarrhea at the very least.

And for only a second he figured he would be okay, because smelling the bacon was almost tantamount to tasting it, so rich was the scent. Then suddenly there were salty-rich crumbles in his mouth and he was digging through the refuse with both hands for every bit he could find.

An indeterminate amount of time later he heard the front door open.

"Dr. Chilton?"

It registered then exactly where Frederick was and what he was doing. When he looked down at his hands, he saw they were covered with grease and specks of burned pork fat. The towel had slipped from his hips and lay on the floor, also speckled with bacon crumbs. He heard footsteps and scrambled to pull it up again, unwilling to be discovered standing naked over Will Graham's trash can with a mouthful of discarded bacon.

"Graham?" He swallowed another chunk of half-masticated meat, not without difficulty.

"It's me," Graham said. "Don't worry."

Frederick heard the telltale ticking of nails on the hardwood-the tide of dogs that Graham had ridden into the house. There was a wet slapping sound as one or more of them began to shake off the snow. To Frederick's surprise, the wet-dog smell wasn't as offensive as he expected. He swallowed again. "Where are my things?"

Graham, who had not bothered to knock the snow from his heavy work boots, walked to the edge of the kitchen, then turned his head away. He may have been concealing a laugh. Seven pairs of unsettlingly keen canine eyes watched from roughly the level of Graham's knees.

"You can't just take my clothes," Frederick said.

"You can't just _wear_ your clothes," said Graham. "I'll have to turn them over to Jack. You're supposed to be stumbling out in the wilderness at large somewhere. It would look awfully suspicious if you came back for your things. As it is I had to burn the ones you wore yesterday."

"You left my underwear!"

Graham smiled and ducked his head again, trying not to look at what was no doubt the ridiculous figure Frederick cut. "I figured giving you mine was a bridge too far."

"This is _all_ a bridge too far," Frederick said. "I'm just not comfortable-"

"Listen, Dr. Chilton," Graham interrupted. "Do you think a cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane would be more comfortable? Because I can tell you from firsthand experience it's not."

That stopped the words in Frederick's throat. He chewed his lower lip for a moment. "I have some money," he said. "If it wouldn't be altogether too much trouble for you, I'd like to ask you to use some of it to buy things for my...stay here."

"I can do that," Graham said. "It won't be the mall at Reston or anything, but I know of a couple of outdoor goods places that'll be good for basic staples. Pants and shirts, maybe a new coat."

Outdoor goods, Frederick thought. That probably meant brands like Patagonia, The North Face, Columbia. Not his cup of tea, as he didn't really go in for the faux-rugged look, but he'd rather look like a wealthy poseur than a ranch hand.

"You'll be cold if you walk around in nothing but underwear until then," said Graham.

"I'm not even sure we wear the same size, Mr. Graham."

"Well," Graham said, "the pants could be a little tight."

Frederick let an indignant sniff slip before he could rein in his offense. "I'm sure it's fine." Sucking in his gut and clutching the towel tight around him, he turned to go.

"Oh, Dr. Chilton?" Graham called.

Frederick turned.

Graham gestured with his knuckles to a spot on his own face near the corner of his mouth. "You've got a little something-" he trailed off.

Brushing at his face, Frederick was appalled to find a good-size crumb of bacon clinging to his left cheek. He flicked it away with a dismissive flourish and turned on his heel, determined that Graham wouldn't see the flush of shame that he could feel creeping up his neck to his face. In any case, it would be worse later when he'd have to destroy the man's bathroom because of one stupid, mindless dietary slip-up.

Cringing in anticipation of the first waves of gastrointestinal protest, Frederick scurried down the hall and back into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He turned toward the bed but stopped cold when he saw his cane propped against the bedside table. He couldn't remember having used it since entering Will Graham's house yesterday. Had it only been one day? It seemed like a year ago that he'd come shambling up the porch steps begging for sanctuary-a request he'd originally been denied.

But any residual anger about being sold out to Jack Crawford yesterday was overtaken by wonder at the fact that he had simply forgotten he walked with a cane. There was no rational-and more importantly, no medical-explanation for it. The rippled scar that twisted like a miniature mountain range over his abdomen was still there, but where before it had felt like a suspension bridge attached with taut steel cables to every single one of his remaining internal organs, now it only meandered across his skin, a tourist attraction.

A cynic by nature, Frederick did not care to assume that the pain would never return, but if worst came to worst he could bear up using the furniture. The idea of returning to bed for the foreseeable future had renewed appeal, but he was far too curious about this newfound mobility. The empiricist in him wanted to test his limits. The wishful thinker wanted to believe he was cured.

Hell with it. He'd hand the cane over to Graham and, if necessary, he'd just have him whittle down a tree branch or something. Wasn't that what these rustics did?

Frederick picked up the t-shirt on the bed, running the rough fabric between his fingers. He gave it a sniff. It smelled like plastic. That, at least, was new and unworn. The plaid overshirt and the corduroys retained a hint of Graham's wretched aftershave. Frederick's lip curled almost on instinct. He himself wore Gaultier's Le Male-a powdery and almost feminine scent if one lacked the nose for its obvious complexities. Graham's stuff telegraphed "philistine alpha jock" so well Frederick would think the stammering profiler would be offended if he were ever convinced to care. On second thought, perhaps the "philistine" part was the operative.

Distaste notwithstanding, he put on the clothes.

The pants were, indeed, just a little tight. He pulled in his gut again and fastened them, annoyed. It was too cold not to wear the overshirt. If Frederick were a fighting man he'd like to punch whomever thought to degrade tartan by combining it with flannel. Those new clothes would have to come sooner rather than later.

Affecting as stiff and regal a posture as he could in cowboy duds, Frederick walked down the hall, cane in hand, taking care that its rubber tip hovered an inch or so above the floor.

Much to Frederick's distaste, he found Graham fiddling with the components of a disassembled chainsaw right on the living room rug. "You'll need this, too," he said, holding out the cane.

"Won't you?"

"I'll manage."

Graham shrugged and took the cane, setting it aside.

One of the smaller dogs got to its feet and padded over to Frederick, sniffing at his cashmere socks. It prodded his toes with its snout once or twice, then whined and lay down, exposing its pink-nippled belly. Frederick tried not to grimace.

"That's Buster," Graham said, unprompted.

"Good to know," said Frederick, taking a couple of shuffling steps backward.

"Not a dog person?" asked Graham.

Frederick pulled his lips back in a grim smile. "I typically have enough helpless dependents under my care to make owning a pet a bit of overkill, Mr. Graham."

"If we're going to be living together for a while, you can at least call me 'Will.'"

"We are not _living_ together," said Frederick. "This is not _living_. This is marking time."

Graham looked unperturbed. He extended his leg to rub Buster's belly with the ball of his foot. "True, it may not be what you're used to. Seems like everyone who's unlucky enough to interact Hannibal has to make compromises."

"Incarceration is not a compromise," Frederick said.

"Are you talking about the hospital, Dr. Chilton, or my home?" asked Graham.

Graham's calm ripostes were starting to get irritating. "You know very well what I mean."

"I do," Graham said. "I don't even need to employ my 'disorder' to empathize with you at this point. Something I never thought I'd say if I were being honest, Dr. Chilton."

"'Frederick' is fine."

Graham smiled. "All right, then, Frederick. I can buy you your clothes tomorrow, but I'm going to the supermarket this afternoon for food. Do you have any requests?"

"Tempeh," Frederick said without hesitation.

Graham frowned. "I'm afraid I have no idea what that is."

Frederick bit back a frustrated sigh. "Fermented soybeans. It's not-" he paused, "-not something to which Hannibal would likely have introduced you. I had to find a meat substitute for one of my favorite dishes. No more pancetta and tomato on sourdough."

Graham's brow wrinkled a moment and then he laughed. "You _can_ call it a BLT."

"I prefer arugula or cress to lettuce," said Frederick.

"Same principle," Graham said, crouching to scratch the still-demanding dog near Frederick's feet.

Frederick looked around him as though there might be food critics policing his words. "Yes, fine. BLT. We all have our little pedestrian indulgences."

"Come to think of it," Graham said, "I might have had a version of one at Hannibal's. Though in retrospect it was probably a PLT."

"'P?'" Frederick asked, then almost immediately held out his hand, palm toward Graham. "No, don't say it. I'm going to be sick." As a matter of fact, he didn't feel sick at all. He felt energized. And glad to the point of near delirium that he had never eaten anything but plant matter at Hannibal Lecter's table.

Graham smiled, but it was rueful. "Okay. Tempeh. Anything else?"

"I, uh, trust your judgment." Frederick said. "Will," he added, after a heavy pause.

"Gotcha," said Will.

Frederick gave a small nod and turned to walk back to the bedroom when Will called after him.

"I'll pick up some more bacon. Just in case."

Frederick whirled, startled, but Will was already disappearing into the kitchen.


	4. Chapter 4

His feet were cold-terribly cold-in the dream. At first, Frederick thought he was standing barefoot on his kitchen tiles, something he was loath to do. He had very sensitive feet. But the feel of the floor below him was rough, knotty. And the cold wasn't just in the ground but in the air.

Though it felt freezing it _smelled_ warm-or, rather, like things that are warm. Fur and blood. Like pushing your face into the thick pelt of a cat (or a dog) and inhaling that powdery-sour scent of the wildness that pulses below the skin as sure as any heartbeat. At their core, animals were jagged tangles of electric instinct; domestication was only the skin wrapped around them.

That skin was thinner for some than for others.

This was what Frederick thought as he stood, freezing, watching a scene resolve. In the dream, he stood on Will Graham's porch, looking out across the pillowy curves of new-fallen snowbanks. To the left of the porch was his car, its lines blunted by the covering of powder. To his right, the panicked path that he had cut through the snow now slowly being subsumed in the gentle blankness. The entire landscape, studded with bare, black, shivering trees, was lit up like a stage. It seemed altogether too bright for the sole light source to be the high, round moon-bright though it was.

Frederick watched his dream-self exhale a long stream of steaming air from his nostrils. It drifted up to wreathe the moon then was gone. He breathed in again to the sound of a strange whine, a scratching grate against his calf. Unwilling to let the captivating dream image go despite the cold, Frederick closed his eyes.

Something invisible seemed to slam into his chest and he gasped. His eyes flew open and he found himself… actually standing on Will Graham's porch, barefoot in the frigid night. He felt the strange prodding against his leg once more. He looked down. The dog that had approached him earlier that day-the one Will called "Buster"-looked up at him with oil-drop eyes, each of which reflected the moon in miniature. It whined again.

Frederick looked up. The moon was out, but it was nowhere near as huge or as bright as it had been in the dream. Otherwise the view before him was exactly the same.

Another whine from the dog. It set off a concatenation of shivers in Frederick's body: the larger muscles seizing, the tremors fluttering out to his extremities. His teeth snapped together with the sound of breaking icicles.

"Sh-sh-_it_," Frederick whispered. He was not given to swearing very often, but if any situation merited it, this was certainly one of them. Pivoting on feet that had already started to go numb, he turned and opened the screen door. The main door beyond it was already flung wide, as if he had been in a particular hurry to freeze himself to death. He slipped inside and closed it as quietly as he could, leery of Will's sleeping form on the couch. All of the dogs on the floor around the sofa raised their heads like a passel of meerkats on one of those nature discovery shows-tense throats, pricked ears, eyes flat and judging.

Frederick looked down at Buster, who still stood by his feet. The thing had almost a querying look on its snubbed little face.

"What do you want?" Frederick whispered. Chastised, the dog lowered its haunches and ducked its head. When he made his way back into the bedroom (nearly clipping his hip on the handle of the disused oven), Buster stood at the threshold of the kitchen and watched him go.

It wasn't until he'd climbed back into bed that Frederick noticed the animal-smell had followed him. It had a quavering, silvery edge that was sharp and tempting. He'd gone inside, but there were still many more shuddering and vulnerable things out there in the night. What a terrible fate, he thought, to live wild-eyed and quick-breathing like that. It was no wonder prey animals' life spans were so short-their persecuted little hearts could only go so long before giving out. In the thickly scented silence of Will Graham's house, Frederick wondered in all seriousness if he would die there. If not shot by Jack Crawford then falling victim to his own overtaxed and sputtering system.

He pulled the quilt up to his chin like a child as he waited for morning. It was an idiotic and empty gesture, but no human being-no matter how old-ever truly gained mastery over the night.

Frederick woke craving more of that wretched bacon. He did hope that Will had made good on his promise to pick some up. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since he'd eaten meat, and all of the old needs and routines-at least in that respect-decided to waste no time flooding back, thinking his system was in the clear.

Though his practice dealt with broken personalities, Frederick was still a medical doctor. In residency, he'd seen cases on the books that beat long odds: spontaneous remission of cancer, infections in severe wounds that seemed to clear almost as the surgeon warmed up his bone saw for amputation. During his gastroenterology rotation, he'd seen a kid with autoimmune colitis recover so quickly he was out of the hospital a day after he'd been near-comatose from dehydration.

That was all to say that it wasn't inconceivable his gut had simply healed on its own. When he got out of this, being the subject of a medical paper on regeneration of intestinal flora was vastly preferable to finding himself the subject of a study on the minds of cannibalistic killers.

_Damn_.

The thought soured his mood in an instant. That was another thing he had going for his defense if he were ever caught. One is required to eat meat in order to be an effective cannibal. Perhaps it was a fluke. The last few days had been, after all, a series of flukes: the big gray dog, Will's change of heart, Crawford's broken ankle. Why not add another to the pile?

Absent anything to do but think, Frederick got up and dressed in the same clothes he'd worn the day before. He hoped Will would be able to pick up a few apparel items for him. To him, these garments were casual to the point of embarrassment. Frederick felt most comfortable in a suit, though he might have to get used to a state of comparative déshabille in order to distance himself from Hannibal Lecter. That in itself was less appetizing (he winced at the pun) than resuming his consumption of meat products.

When he emerged in the kitchen, Will was staring out the window over the small breakfast table, as rapt as if he himself were having the same dream Frederick had the night before.

"Scary, isn't it?" Will asked, unprompted, still looking out over the snow.

"What is?" Frederick asked.

Will turned toward him, shaking his head a little as if to rattle loose his reverie. "Sleepwalking."

"What?" asked Frederick, taken aback. "You saw me?"

"I heard you," said Will. "I heard the door, specifically. People who are awake don't just pop out to the porch for air in the middle of the night. Barefoot, no less. You don't like discomfort, Frederick. So I deduced."

"Clever deduction," Frederick said, the words entirely insincere. "And no one likes discomfort."

"Without discomfort, we are incapable of change," Will said. "It's consciousness-raising."

"I never thought I'd find myself saying this to another human being, having heard it a time or two myself," Frederick said, "but spare me the psychobabble."

Will smiled. "At least _I_ never said it to you."

"Not in so many words."

"Have you sleepwalked before?" Will asked, scooting his chair backward and standing up.

"Not that I can recall," Frederick said. "But, then, these are extraordinary circumstances."

Will looked like he was just at the point of saying something, then he backed off from that edge and only nodded in response.

"It wasn't frightening, though," said Frederick, feeling defensive. "Interesting, maybe."

"Were you dreaming?" asked Will. He walked over to the coffeemaker and dumped the cold grounds into the trash.

"No," Frederick lied. It wasn't too far off the truth-he'd seen what had been a heightened version of what was already there.

"Hm."

"You don't believe me?" _Methinks the doctor doth protest too much._

"I do," Will said. "Just comparing experiences." He was silent for a moment, the only audible sound the swishing of the dogs' tails and the whisper of coffee grounds into a crisp new filter. "It scares me every single time."

"Do you dream?" Frederick asked. "I mean, when it's happening?"

"Yes," Will said. "Always have. Except when I was in the hospital. It's like my mind was in a cage as well."

"That sounds-" Frederick stopped himself.

"Awful?" Will laughed.

Frederick felt a blush heating up his face. "You have to understand," he said. "The evidence-"

Will held up one hand. "It's okay. Hannibal is...thorough."

"You admire him."

"I do," said Will. "It doesn't mean I can't distrust him."

"Or despise him," said Frederick, hissing the words through clenched teeth.

Will shook his head. "I don't despise Hannibal. He's, well, a fascinating case study."

"Are you insane?"

"I'm thinking of resuming my therapy with him."

"You _are_ insane."

"We'll be meeting on equal ground," said Will. "Neither one of us under suspicion."

"No," Frederick said, letting the bitterness emerge unreserved, "that's my lot."

"Hannibal knows that I know. It's only a matter of time," said Will.

"Time I don't have," said Frederick.

"It's true I can't entirely protect you," Will told him. "But you may be underestimating your capacity for protecting yourself."

Frederick said nothing. Will's words had a shine of truth, especially after the run-in with the dog, out of which he'd somehow pulled himself unscathed.

Will fought back a widening grin. "Just don't sleepwalk to Quantico and you'll be okay."

"Very funny," Frederick said. "I don't think 'okay' is on the table in any fashion right now. Do you?"

"I don't think it will be for a long time," Will said.

They stood in silence for a couple of very long minutes, listening to the gurgle and hiss of the coffee maker.

Will broke the silence at last. "I can get you clothes today. Later, though."

"That's fine."

"Jack is coming by."

"_What_?"

"He's taking your things," Will said, pulling two mugs from the cabinet. "But he has no reason to search the house."

"And just what, exactly, am I supposed to do? Hide in the closet?"

"Is that something you're used to?" Will asked.

Frederick could tell he was biting back a smile. "Are you implying that you think I'm homosexual?"

"No," Will said. "Not that there would be anything wrong with that."

"No, well-" Frederick started. "No."

"You might as well know that I am," Will said.

"You're-?" Frederick couldn't stop himself from gawping.

Will laughed. "Is that so hard to believe?"

"I'm sorry, of course. No. I mean, not surprising. Well, it is-ah, there's nothing wrong with that." Frederick was stumbling over his own tongue.

Will smiled.

Running a thumb below his lip, trying to regain his composure, Frederick weighed his next statement.

"I promise I won't hit on you," Will said. He removed the steaming coffee pot from below the filter basket and filled their cups.

"No need to be crude, Mr. Graham," said Frederick. "I wasn't judging. It's just-"

Will turned to face him and held out his hands, palms up. "Ask me anything."

"Was I misreading the dynamic between you and Lecter?" He would be less uncomfortable about the line of questioning if he weren't standing in Will Graham's clothes in Will Graham's kitchen-the very definition of "out of his element."

"You were not," Will said. "There was-_is_-a strong draw. An attraction. The relationship was only briefly… physical, but I identify with Hannibal in ways that can only be characterized as 'intimate.'"

"I'd counsel you against having anything more to do with Hannibal Lecter, if I thought you'd pay the least attention." Frederick held out his hand for the proffered mug of coffee. "If I may ask, why didn't you tell me any of this at the hospital?"

Will smirked. "Beyond the obvious bitterness? Suffice to say that I believe my time there was a test of character for me. An internal struggle. Just as I believe this is yours."

The observation made Frederick purse his lips in distaste. "Do tell. How am I bearing up?"

"I'm not attacking you. I promise," Will said. "I'm only suggesting that the person you are at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is not who Frederick Chilton is."

As much as Frederick wanted to snap back with a sour rejoinder, he found that the words stuck in his throat.

Seeing the obvious conflict on his face and taking pity on him, Will asked, "What would you like for breakfast? Tempeh on toast?"

Frederick thought he saw Will flick a glance toward the trash can, but it could have been his imagination. _Bacon and eggs_ was the response he wanted to give, but what he said was, "Just toast is fine."

Frederick was crouched in a heavily quilt-padded coat closet long before Jack Crawford's car pulled into Will's drive. He had quite obviously brought another representative from the BAU forensics team. With enough forethought, Will had installed him in the hall closet rather than the one in his own room because Frederick had (foolishly) used the shower in the master suite.

He could hear snippets of conversations for about an hour-enough to be lulled into a relative sense of security before heavy footsteps stopped before the door. Frederick put a hand over his mouth and bit into the meat of his finger to stop himself from whimpering.

"Did Dr. Chilton go anywhere else in your house?" That was Jack Crawford; Frederick recognized the deep timbre immediately. Crawford's voice was one that could go from soothing to threatening in a split second. "Did you give him anything? We need to know."

"Everything he had he brought," Will said. "He may have used my shampoo." Will put an upward inflection on the last word, making the words seem guileless.

Frederick had to grudgingly admire his effort to sell it.

"I know you don't believe it, Will," said Crawford. "But we need to go where the evidence points. Even you have to admit what we have is pretty overwhelming."

"I'm not going to impede an investigation," Will said. "But you know where I stand on this, Jack. If Hannibal can frame one person so completely-so utterly-he can set up another one to take the fall, too."

"My hands are tied at this point," Crawford said. "You were released because the Ripper was obviously still working while you were incarcerated. Not because of any new evidence. We're going to keep working on Miriam. Maybe she'll remember something, but I wouldn't count on too much. You know how trauma is."

"Yes," Will said. "I know how trauma is."

"Will," said Crawford, "I'm sorry. I can't tell you how sorry I am often enough."

"It's not your fault, Jack. Like you said, you're going where the evidence leads you."

"And right now, that's toward Dr. Chilton."

"It doesn't get much more incriminating than a house full of bodies," Will said. His tone was rich with skepticism.

Frederick wanted to leap out of his hiding place, _make_ Crawford believe him. Make him see Hannibal as he'd last seen him: still swathed in his tony bespoke plaids underneath what was probably a hand-tailored splatter suit. Face impassive, even mocking. Knowing. _Knowing_.

Instead he held his breath.

"If anything new comes up, you'll be the first to know," Crawford said. "Until then, we're leaving no stone unturned. For Bev."

"For Bev," Will echoed. The words were hollow with both grief and dissatisfaction.

Ah, yes. Beverly Katz. The lab tech that Hannibal had julienned and laid out like sashimi. Thinking about it made Frederick nearly gag. At least… at least he was alive. A tiny-possibly unnamed and unidentifiable-part of Frederick twinged with guilt over what he'd said to Will about "marking time." The man had no obligation to shelter him.

Then again, the man had made it more or less clear that Frederick was meant to play a part in his ridiculous endgame with Hannibal Lecter. There, hiding in Will Graham's coat closet, Frederick vowed that he wouldn't be anyone else's pawn.

"Sir?"

The third voice made Frederick jump. He had to stuff his fist in his mouth to keep from crying out.

"I'm finishing up with the car."

_Oh, no. Not his car._

Of course they would take it. Whether he was locked up by the state or not, Lecter had taken his freedom and the FBI was just sweeping the last bits of his life into the dustpan. His Bruno Magli overnighter, his TSE cashmere sweaters, his Audemars-Piguet Millenary Tourbillon Chronograph, for god's sake.

All comfort, all familiarity-all gathered up and carted away while he sat huddled in the cowl of Will Graham's handmade quilt.

So it was hope instead of irritation that he found when Will said, "I'm going to catch him at it, Jack. One way or another, I'm going to nail Hannibal down."


	5. Chapter 5

"Will he be back?" was the first thing Frederick had asked when he exited the coat closet.

"I can't say," Will had told him.

Afterward, despite what felt like a narrow escape, Frederick had lapsed into a sour mood. It wasn't only that his life was burdened with too many variables, but it seemed that his life _itself_ was a variable. On the page, the mathematics of his predicament might look simple: transfer his equivalence to Hannibal Lecter. Solve for X.

But there were endless steps behind the solution, and each bore the name of one of the Ripper's victims, further weighted with falsehood that concealed layers of evidence. (_Evidence!_ He sneered at the word.)

Frederick almost had to admire (_almost_) the beauty of the problem, the way it resolved without tipping the balance by even a micron. He was guilty, Lecter was innocent. A complete switch of responsibility was the only way to clear his name. The task seemed insurmountable.

It certainly didn't help that he'd refused to let Will leave to buy him clothing, just in case Jack Crawford doubled back and he was alone, unprotected. Will didn't seem perturbed, and said he would go the next day.

Exhausted from the constant low-level fear that had plagued him that evening, Frederick retired to bed early. He had surprised himself by being gracious enough to half-suggest that Will return to his own room, that he himself would take the couch, but he took Will's hemming and hawing as a "no" and proceeded thusly.

He must have been more tired than he'd thought, because he was asleep nearly as soon as his head hit the pillow. In the dream this time, he stood on Will's porch once again, though it wasn't cold. This time trees rustled in a night wind that was as warm as a blanket on his skin. Looking past the house, Frederick found he could make out every leaf fluttering on its respective branch. The effect was like being underwater. It was intoxicating.

Equally intoxicating-if not more so-was the smell: that same wild blood-heat but magnified, nuanced. It made Frederick's stomach clench. The desire to seek out the source of that smell was almost sexual, drawing his body with his mind pulled along behind like a child's battered wagon. Dream-Frederick clenched his fists, closed his eyes, and breathed.

Much to his surprise, his dream avatar opened its mouth and screamed, the oddly clear sound ringing off into the night. It rolled across the night landscape and Frederick could almost feel the nocturnal animals-and the diurnal ones in their burrows-freeze with fluttering hearts. He smiled. It was an unusual feeling of power in a situation of powerlessness. If he had no control over his days, at least he could slip into a night (however unreal) in which he had sway.

If he weren't in a dream, Frederick might have given a split-second's thought to the unsavory truth that he had never really had any control over his days. The lunatics (Let's be honest here. And yes, even Will Graham was crazy in his own way, just not serial-killer crazy.) he dealt with were blank walls he beat his fists against during every single session. Trying, trying. In all senses of the word. These frustrating days slid into nights that were supposed to function as decompression but ended up giving no comfort. Amid his fine things and his good music and his excellent liquor, Frederick most often ended up just plain lonely.

Luckily, he was deep in a dream and could not be bothered by these things.

What was bothering him was his stomach. So much so that it woke him up. Frederick came to curled in bed with gastric complaints so loud he was surprised Will hadn't been awoken as well. At first, he thought that the bacon had finally come 'round to give his battered body its due, but he realized after a moment that he was hungry. Starving. Hell, _ravenous_.

He put a hand over his belly, trying in vain to quiet it.

_Could it be that his tiny paunch was shrinking a little?_

The thought, pleasant though it may be, was being run roughshod over by hunger pangs. Dreading the cold once he slipped out from beneath the blankets, Frederick nonetheless swung himself out of bed and padded down the hall toward the kitchen for the first _literal_ midnight snack he could remember having in years.

He hurried past Will's sleeping form-a bundle of blankets too distastefully reminiscent of his stay in the hall closet-on the couch, and into the kitchen. The wan light of the refrigerator spilled out over his face, and the cool air felt good on skin almost feverish from hunger. Scanning the contents of the refrigerator, Frederick saw next to nothing that would suit a palate refined both by choice and by necessity. There was a carton of eggs, some cheese, far too many condiments for anything that Will Graham cooked or ate. (Maybe they were there to make his microwave meals palatable. Frederick didn't dare look at the freezer compartment.) A few items were obvious-if oblivious-nods to Frederick's condition, such as it was: a bag of carrots, a head of wilting lettuce. Under a bag that turned out to contain two small bell peppers was a styrofoam tray of ground beef.

Frederick shoved the peppers out of the way and took the package out. His fingertips made pleasing squeaks on the plastic wrap as he stared at the hamburger. Looking at the fat that marbled the tiny squiggles of meat made his mouth water.

_Would Will wake up if he threw it in a pan and put it on the stove?_

Regardless, cooking the meat would attract some unwelcome canine attention, and for a reason he couldn't seem to pin down, Frederick was feeling awfully protective of this meal that he wasn't even supposed to have.

He dug his fingers harder into the plastic wrap while he mulled it over, feeling the thin membrane distend like a full stomach. Oh, God, he was hungry.

The click-click of claws on the linoleum tore his attention away from the beef for a second. Buster again, its inquisitive face lit up with expectation.

"No way," Frederick whispered at the dog. It gave a soft whine and sank to its belly on the cool floor.

He'd been so distracted that he hadn't noticed his fingers had punched straight through the plastic and were buried to the second knuckle in the cool, greasy mess. He withdrew his fingers slowly, looking at the sheen that painted them, the raggedy bits of meat that clung there. Closing his eyes, he raised the hand to his face and inhaled the raw, bloody scent. It was awful, it smelled like certain death from food poisoning. And before he even realized it, Frederick was scooping of the raw beef into his mouth, barely pausing to chew.

He found himself thinking it might have lost something had he cooked it. That this was the thought that actually preceded _What the everloving fuck are you doing?_ definitely said something about his mindset. Horrified, Frederick stopped, another handful halfway to his lips.

"What is wrong with me?" he asked the open refrigerator. The heavy meat aroma on his breath was dizzying; he had a sudden and almost irrepressible urge to shove his face into the charnel-scented carton and clean it. As such he'd already eaten half.

Instead, he wiped his lips with the back of his hand in disgust-a rather futile gesture considering that the hand was also covered with grease, and set the tray down on the floor in front of Buster. The dog looked up at him with such obvious reverence in its demeanor that Frederick felt almost abashed.

"Go ahead," he whispered, motioning with his hand. Buster tucked in and was licking the styrofoam clean in just short of a minute. Frederick hoped neither he nor the dog would get sick.

The meat was sitting pleasantly in his stomach now, making him drowsy. He tucked the incriminating container underneath some discarded plastic bags in the trash can, shut the refrigerator door, and returned to the bed. He hadn't even noticed until he climbed in that Buster had followed.

As soon as the dog crouched, Frederick knew it was about to jump.

"No way," he repeated, but it was too late.

Buster was padding around in circles on the quilt.

"Shoo!" Frederick said in a stage whisper.

Instead of shoo-ing, Buster plopped down and laid his head on his paws.

Frederick sighed. "Fine," he said. "But you stay on your side."

The next day, Will had to return to work. Frederick was terrified almost to the point of paralysis that Crawford would show up again, but Will assured him it was Crawford who had called him out to the scene of a(nother) bizarre murder and would have more pressing things to think about than the remnants of Frederick Chilton's brief visit to Will's home.

However, Will's absence also meant that he was alone with the horror of having consumed an entire package of hamburger _raw_. He had nothing on which to blame the decision to eat it in the first place: no dreams, no sleepwalking. He'd simply been hungry and that's what had looked good.

Statistically, he was more likely to contract Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from raw hamburger than, say, a good aged steak, which made him give in to a bit of helpless irritation at Will's poor taste. How much could the federal government possibly pay him, though? The man was probably living hand-to-mouth.

Frederick decided to shuffle his fears off to the side and do a bit of digging into what, exactly, Will Graham had. He went through each room of the house-not _digging_, necessarily-just perusing what was visible. He was pleased to see that, despite the lived-in look of the place, Will did not appear to be sentimental at all. The various implements of his leisure time made up most of what could be called décor: fly tying rigs, snowshoes, leashes and harnesses hung like the world's saddest piece of modern art by the door. The only thing that might have qualified as a keepsake was one of those model ships in a bottle: a two-masted sloop with paper sails and waxed thread for rigging.

And he had books. A lot of them. It wasn't their presence that surprised Frederick but their subject matter. Perhaps he had expected Will to own a moldering rack of _Psychology Today_, old forensic textbooks, _The Compleat Angler_. Instead he found a number of classics both ancient and modern. _The Golden Bough, Carmilla, Stranger in a Strange Land_.

Frederick pulled down a well-thumbed copy of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_. It was something that he had heard of but had not read (his humanities requirements in college had been fulfilled with an audit of a couple of twentieth-century literature classes). He settled into a battered wing chair to have a look.

The poetic translation was old and somewhat laughable, but from what he could see it was another creation myth. What mainly came through was the poet's contempt for his own era. Line after line, Ovid railed against men who were fallen and debased-the worst of them some guy named Lycaon. That got Frederick wondering exactly what the man had done that made him so despised. He read on:

_I'll try, said he, and if a god appear,_  
><em>To prove his deity shall cost him dear.<em>  
><em>'Twas late; the graceless wretch my death prepares,<em>  
><em>When I shou'd soundly sleep, opprest with cares:<em>  
><em>This dire experiment he chose, to prove<em>  
><em>If I were mortal, or undoubted Jove:<em>  
><em>But first he had resolv'd to take my pow'r;<em>  
><em>Not long before, but in a luckless hour,<em>  
><em>Some legates, sent from the Molossian state,<em>  
><em>Were on a peaceful errand come to treat:<em>  
><em>Of these he murders one, he boils the flesh;<em>  
><em>And lays the mangled morsels in a dish:<em>  
><em>Some part he roasts; then serves it up, so drest,<em>  
><em>And bids me welcome to this humane feast.<em>

Frederick shut the book and crammed it back on the shelf as if it had bitten him.

_Cannibalism._

That was the transgression that got Lycaon permanently on the gods' list of _personae non gratae_. Frederick felt a little sick. He hoped it wasn't the hamburger, coming up at last to wreak its vengeance.

Will came home very late that night, burdened with two bags full of clothing...and a story.

Frederick had to grudgingly admit the man had at least a modicum of taste-at least in terms of gear for roughing it, as it were-as he pawed through the selection. A couple of pairs of rip-stop trousers, two or three moisture-wicking t-shirts, a sweater, two microfleece half-zip pullovers. The only objectionable item was a quilted down coat the style and shade of which Frederick would never have looked at twice. Yes, they were warm, but there was nothing cosmopolitan about nylon. He would consent to being a little colder in wool for the sake of what his college girlfriend Linda-she of the heated eyelash curler worthy of an Inquisitor's dungeon-called "suffering for beauty." It suggested the sort of frail, consumptive loveliness that Linda herself had embodied. Frederick's cleverly buried romantic tendencies had snagged the phrase and held onto it long after he'd ended things with Linda. It cropped up with a regularity that might have been embarrassing had he ever spoken it aloud.

He frowned a little and grunted as he examined the coat, but said nothing more.

"You're welcome," said Will. "Did the dogs eat?"

"Did the dogs eat what?" Frederick asked.

"Their food."

Frederick blinked. " I wouldn't have the first clue as to where it is."

Will seemed unperturbed. "I'll show you for next time."

Now there was an unsavory thought. Frederick tried not to imagine himself wrestling an enormous bag of foul-smelling kibble out of a pantry.

Will shed his coat and went into the kitchen, the dogs on his heels, ravenous as though they hadn't been fed in a week. Frederick heard their whines and felt an ever-so-slight guilt grab him by the sleeve of the plaid shirt.

Suddenly he couldn't wait to get changed.

"Are you hungry?" Will asked.

It was a very conversational tone to use with the animals. At least he didn't indulge in baby-talk. A small mercy, Frederick thought.

Will opened the cabinet under the sink and hauled out a monstrous bag. It must cost half of Will's consulting fees to feed this brood of beasts.

"Frederick, are you hungry?"

Snapped out of his horrified reverie at the size of the food bag, Frederick raised his head. "Sorry, I thought you were talking to the dogs."

Will laughed. "That's the great thing about dogs. You talk to them, they won't talk back. No offense."

"None taken," Frederick said, offended. "Spend too long talking to dogs, you may forget how to talk to people. No offense."

Will's laugh was practically a guffaw this time. "None taken."

"And yes, in answer to your question," Fredrick said. "I could eat."

Will hefted the bag and poured a hail of skittering, meat-flavored pebbles over the linoleum. Most of them missed the stainless steel bowls set out in a line. The dogs didn't seem to care, snuffling and knocking the bowls out of the way as they hoovered up the food.

Frederick wrinkled his nose.

After he'd replaced the huge bag (Frederick had already decided to plead injury despite the fact that he was now walking without the cane), Will went to the fridge. "You know you're more than welcome to cook while I'm gone," he said.

"It slipped my mind," said Frederick. "I was reading."

Will looked over, his face illuminated by a cool wedge of light from the open refrigerator. "So you've found my modest library."

"You have some unexpected selections, Mr. Graham."

"Expecting more of a philistine palate?"

Frederick felt a small flush of shame creep up his neck. He adjusted the collar of Will's shirt around his neck. "I wasn't expecting Ovid," he said.

"No offense?" asked Will, his tone light, even teasing.

"Indeed," said Frederick.

"_The Metamorphoses_," said Will. "Surprisingly useful from a profiler's point of view. Even if only to show that people don't really change. Or, rather, even when they do change, they don't change."

Frederick wasn't sure he quite understood, so he stayed silent.

"Speaking of change, this homicide was weird," said Will.

"If you'll pardon my saying so," Frederick said, "it seems to me that all the cases you come by are 'weird.'"

"True enough," said Will. He slapped a couple of plastic-wrapped slabs of tempeh on the counter.

"How was it 'weird?'"

"It looked like an animal attack," Will said. "Significant trauma associated with mauling. But these bites and claw marks were deep. And exhibited none of the ragged edges associated with the kind of shaking that a dog or even a bear would do."

"What do you think it is?" Frederick asked.

"Well, obviously it's a person. But this person wants to _be_ an animal, and uses weapons accordingly. You'd probably have a great time trying to pry open his head."

"No doubt," said Frederick, entirely unsure whether or not he wanted to do any prying open of heads any time soon. The whole Hannibal thing had thrown him for the proverbial loop.

"Hm," said Will. "I may have to try some of this tempeh. I could have sworn I had some hamburger…"


	6. Chapter 6

On the day of Will's first post-incarceration appointment with Hannibal Lecter, Frederick saw the dog again. He didn't actually know it was the day of Will's appointment, which was probably a good thing because on top of that seeing the huge, shaggy thing dancing outside his window would have shaken him clean out of his skin.

It was Buster who noticed, of course. (Yes, all right, the little dog had begun—not without some initial protest from Frederick—to sleep in the crook of his knees as he lay huddled against the cold in Will's bed.)

That morning, Buster sailed off the bed, a momentarily airborne sausage. It was shocking that he didn't break his tiny legs hitting the cold wood floor. But no, he scrabbled for purchase for a second then ran to the window, barking up a storm.

"Dog," Frederick said, swinging out of bed. Then: "Dog!"

The wolfy-looking mutt had its rear paws planted in the snow just below the second floor window. It was looking up at Frederick, brazen as you please, with a canine sort of smile on its face. Its breath came in puffs and clumps of snow flew from forepaws that were popping up and down, up and down. To Frederick, it looked for all the world like it wanted another piece of him.

He stumbled back from the window, nearly kicking Buster in the process. "Will!" He thumped down the hall, forgetting his slippers, still calling. "Will!"

All he heard from the guest bathroom was the sound of a shower running.

"Dammit," Frederick said. Over the sound of the rushing water came a noise like a generator, a low rumble. He hadn't seen one around the house, but the impression was dispelled when he made it to the front foyer. All of the dogs were standing at the door, paws raised, tails tense and quivering. Their growling rose and fell in waves of white noise.

Frederick was seized with panic. Was the dog still out there? If so, would it run away if he let Will's dogs out? Would it hurt one of them?

_No, he absolutely refused to believe that the snap of pain in his chest was a tiny tug of anxiety on behalf of little Buster._

"Will?" he tried again. There was no sound from the bathroom but the steady hiss of the water.

Frederick pushed his way through the mass of canine bodies, trying to get at the window. The snow was a blank plain, the tire tracks from Will's car only faint suggestions. The porch was spattered red.

For the second time in two minutes, Frederick lurched backward, managing this time to step on a tender paw and earning a yelp.

"Everything okay?" Will asked. He had a towel wrapped around his waist and was scrubbing his unruly hair with another. He'd obviously just sprayed himself down with aftershave; the smell of the cheap stuff clung to him like a cloud.

"The dog!" Frederick said, trying not to cough. "The one that bit me. Or tried to. Whatever. In any case, it was out there."

Will gave him a dubious look.

"There's something on the porch," said Frederick, starting to feel a little foolish.

The huddle of dogs parted as Will walked toward the door. They looked up at him, noses raised, worshipful and expectant. "It's a rabbit," he said.

"Oh, ugh," Frederick said. "Don't tell me that thing _left_ it there."

"It could have been injured," said Will. "Crawled up on the porch last night and died here."

"Ugh."

"I think you've seen worse."

"Don't remind me," Frederick said. In the same measure as he was disgusted, he was also oddly curious. He couldn't shake the feeling that the big dog had left it there for him. As a warning?

"I guess we need to be on the lookout for something out there," Will said.

"You believe me?"

"Better safe than sorry. I should bury that thing so the dogs don't get at it."

"Yes," said Frederick. "Please."

As much as part of him wanted to go out and see the "gift," he held the dogs back from the door when Will got dressed and headed out into the cold to get rid of it.

Frederick watched as Will carted the dead thing out into the brush. The limp rabbit swung like a pendulum, hypnotic.

"I'll be late tonight," Will said as he came back in, stamping the snow from his boots at the threshold.

Frederick nodded. He had been prepared to fight down panic at the announcement, but found himself less perturbed than he expected. God forbid, though, that he ever get used to this arrangement. It was just temporary. Just until Lecter was behind bars.

"Can you…?" Will said, rubbing his cold-reddened nose.

"Can I…?"

"That is, uh, could you feed the dogs tonight?"

"Oh!" Frederick said. "Oh. Yes. Sure."

Will's face split in the first genuine grin Frederick thought he'd ever seen from the man. "Great."

After Will left, Frederick settled into the lumpy armchair with a volume he figured had to be a less anxiety-inducing book than the Ovid. It turned out to cause the exact opposite of that itchy tension: overwhelming boredom. Fielding a little guilt, he decided to indulge in a nap. More often than he would ever say, Frederick used to close and lock the door of his office, sit in his tufted leather desk chair with a lapful of dry, academic papers, and let his chin drift down onto his chest. If his patrician nose served as an echo chamber for his light snores, he himself would never know.

Now, he thought, some third-rate halfwit could be occupying that office in his stead. As a matter of pride, Frederick had never kept a deputy administrator. They would have had to import someone from another facility—in D.C., most likely—to run the place. Into the ground, most likely. Frederick bristled. Then again, it was of some comfort that there were no truly juicy cases on the rotation at the hospital. Will Graham (now his inadvertent benefactor and didn't _that_ still sting a bit?) had been freed and the real Chesapeake Ripper was calmly holding court in his own overstyled office. Once he was caught, and Frederick's name was cleared, Hannibal would belong to the hospital. He'd be Frederick's forever and he'd never, ever leave.

It was on that less depressing thought that Frederick drifted off.

And dreamed.

The day was gray, the horizon pasted over with low smudges of cloud. Dream-Frederick stepped off the porch and for a moment thought he'd fallen because he was so close to the ground. Then he turned to look back at the porch and saw reflected in the window glass the face of the big gray dog.

But it wasn't looking _out_ at him from inside. It _was_ him. Frederick's jaw dropped open and the mouth of the dog in the glass dropped open as well, a violent red tongue unfurling. He clicked his mouth shut so hard he nearly nipped off the tip of that tongue with strong jaws. Frederick turned—curiously no less nimble on four feet than he had been on two—and examined his reflection more closely.

He wasn't the same dog. Dream-dog-Frederick's fur was dark brown, nearly black. His eyes were blacker. And somehow, now that he was on equal ground, he was much less afraid of running into the other dog.

Frederick felt something he had never felt before in his life. He felt _fierce_. While considering whether or not to go up to the window and examine himself more closely, a breeze kicked up and brought with it an incredible scent. Visceral and thick, with the smallest hint of sweetness. Dream-dog-Frederick forgot about his reflection, wheeled and set off to follow that scent.

Strings of saliva fell from his tongue into the snow and he didn't care. All that mattered was finding the source of that smell.

If the dog part didn't know where it was headed, the human part of Frederick figured it out very quickly. He was loping off in the direction of the hillock where Will had disposed of the mutilated rabbit. That had to be the source.

Man-Frederick's mind rebelled. Dog-Frederick was having none of that insurgency. And the smell was far too good. Better than the bacon by half. _Rabbit tartare_.

Man-Frederick laughed in his head. The dog was silent, every muscle quivering.

And then he was on it. The thing was frozen, tougher than jerky, but bracing it with huge forepaws he found he could tear it apart after only a few seconds of worrying at it. He could hear the dogs inside the house barking, screaming, but he paid them no mind. The rabbit was dissolving in his jaws. He wrenched the hide from its back and fit his canines in between the delicate ribs, then shook his head once and neatly broke the thing's back. The sound made his haunches grow quivery and weak, and he had to lower his belly into the snow as he probed with his tongue for the sweet marrow in the rabbit's spine.

_Ecstasy_.

_Ecstasy_.

Man-Frederick tried to be repulsed, but he was pushed too far back in the mind of the animal to muster the energy.

It was Buster leaping into his lap and licking his face that woke him up at last. After he was startled out of the chair, sending the dog tumbling to the floor, he felt a little bad. But it was only when he bent to give Buster a little pat on the head after he'd bounded back up again that Frederick felt the freezing wetness against his ankles. His pants legs were crusted with snow, only starting to drip in bell-shaped puddles around his feet. Shoeless as they were, said feet were freezing to the point of pain.

Frederick toppled backward, the musty cushion of the chair puffing dust up around him. He sneezed, then watched a small tuft of white fur drift from his mouth to the floor in the watery daylight.

It had to have been Buster's..._right_?

With a hand over his mouth, Frederick barely made it to the kitchen before he was throwing up into the sink. He closed his eyes and left them closed for a long time, even after the retching had stopped. He didn't want to look, didn't want to witness a mess of gore—raw gristle and splinters of rabbit bone.

When he opened one eye, though, it was just the bland yellow spatter of half-digested toast. He nearly sank to the floor in relief, a sensation that extended to cover his gratitude that Will hadn't seen him this time. No doubt he'd been wandering out in the snow for a good long while. But he hadn't been on his belly in it, and he certainly hadn't been eating a dead rabbit. Frederick felt a sudden surge of anger at the big gray dog. It had managed to bait him twice now—once with the corpse on the porch and then again, inadvertently, with an idiotic dream that had him traipsing unarmed and shoeless through the winter wilds of Wolf Trap. There was a tiny, irrational part of his mind that wanted to believe it wasn't so inadvertent, but Frederick knew too much about the human subconscious to really believe that dogs could control dreams.

He had just been triggered, that was all. Perhaps the anxiety he hadn't felt when Will left had bubbled to the surface in the form of this "episode."

Frederick wrinkled his nose, and set about washing the mess down the sink. He did not return to the chair or the book again.

True to his word, Will came in at around nine that evening. Frederick hadn't planned on giving anything other than a cursory greeting, but Will seemed in the mood to talk.

"That was interesting," he said, pouring a small pan of boiling water precariously into a mug for tea. He gestured to the mug—a question—but Frederick demurred.

"The case?"

"Let's say my own case," Will said.

It didn't take but a second or two for Frederick to catch on. "Hannibal."

One corner of Will's mouth quirked up in a sly half-smile. "You can save your warnings," he said.

"Oh, I know," said Frederick. "I have never been able to influence you." The last statement was tinged with no small amount of self-pity.

"I was still coming out from under Hannibal's influence. Completing my metamorphosis."

"Only to go right back under that influence?" Frederick asked. "I presume I don't need to tell you about the fragility of the empathetic mind."

"You're right," Will said. "I can't hide or subvert my..._disorder_. I can only reorient it."

Frederick huffed. "I consider myself fairly astute, but I was blindsided by Hannibal more than once."

The look Will shot him said that he was in doubt, to say the least, of Frederick's perceptive powers. That _hurt_. He had to take a few breaths to keep from going immediately on the defensive. He was too curious about what had happened during Will's "appointment" with the man who had framed both of them.

"Nobody knows that better than I do," Will said. "We do. But our eyes have been forcibly opened. You and I are party to information that no one else has."

"And look where it landed us," Frederick said, fighting off the horror at his slight glow of pride that he was party to such exclusive knowledge. _At the cost of having dead men arranged like _objets d'art_ all over his home_.

"You're restricted right now, but you won't be for long," Will said.

"Because of you?"

"Because of me."

"Taking on Hannibal."

"Taking on Hannibal on his own level." Will raised the teacup to his lips, holding Frederick's gaze.

"Oh, dear God," Frederick said. "You're not going to fight him. You're going to _become_ him."

"I've already become what I am," Will said. "My advantage is that Hannibal doesn't know what that is."

Frederick sat down in one of the squeaky kitchen chairs. "And just how do you know that?"

"He's blinded. Just like I was."

"By trust?" Frederick said. "I don't think so."

"Not by trust," said Will. "By love."

"_Love_? Hannibal Lecter is a cold-blooded killer. Not to mention a cannibal, for God's sake. He's incapable of loving anyone."

"I know that," Will said. "But, once again, he doesn't. Everything he did to me he did because he believed it was the best thing for me. Misplaced to say the least, but he accomplished his goal. He transformed me. Just not in the way he thinks."

"That's, if you'll pardon my saying it, Mr. Graham, one hell of a gamble."

"It happens to be the only one we've got," said Will. "More specifically, the only one _you've_ got."

Frederick clenched his fists. He didn't want to admit to himself the fulfillment of a pattern in his life: his confidence in his own control up until the point that the rug was taken out from under him, landing him hard on his ass every single time. This time with possibly fatal consequences. Even more than that, he did not want to admit that Will was perfectly correct: he had only one hope and that was Will's ability to slip into Hannibal Lecter's blind spot. If it even existed.

"So what, exactly," Frederick asked, "do you intend to make Hannibal think he's turned you into?"

"An animal," Will said. "Something like our current killer."

"Is Hannibal controlling him?" Frederick asked.

"No," said Will, grimacing as he took a swig of the cooling tea. "This killer thinks he is controlling the animal he wants to be, when it's the animal controlling him."

Frederick leaned back in his chair, aghast. "So in the meantime, your grand plan is to make yourself into Hannibal's _pet_?"

"In as many words, I guess so."

"Oh, God," Frederick said. "I'm _fucked_."


	7. Chapter 7

"Clinical lycanthropy," Will said. They had been talking again about the "beast killer."

Will's diagnosis still managed to shock Frederick despite his ongoing intense interest in abnormal psychology. Maybe it was because he was starting to think of his _own_ psychology as tending a bit toward the abnormal. "Are you sure?" he asked. "From what I've read, sufferers of clinical lycanthropy don't build mechanical exoskeletons to fulfill their delusions. In fact, I believe it's mostly beyond them."

"Hannibal has a theory," said Will.

Frederick rolled his eyes. "Hannibal doesn't have theories. He has certainties."

"Well, that's what we're counting on, actually. He said he treated a boy a few years ago who was convinced he was a predator animal."

"Was the therapy successful?"

"Hannibal thought it was," said Will.

Frederick huffed. "Which means the poor kid probably ended up worse off than he started."

"Here's the thing," Will said. "He's still in the area. The kid's name is Randall Tier, and he works at the Smithsonian. In specimen assemblage."

"He puts together dinosaurs?" Frederick barked a laugh.

"Among other things," said Will. "The tooth marks on the bodies don't match those of any living predator."

"So you're not saying he made up a monster. You're saying he resurrected one."

Will frowned. "Possibly."

"It's a stretch," said Frederick. "Clinical lycanthropy is degenerative. If your Randall Tier was untreated—which, if he was seeing Hannibal Lecter, is as good as the same thing—he should be in an institution by now, not in...well, an _institution_."

Will laughed. "Still, it can be reversed with proper medication. If Tier was schizophrenic and it's now controlled, he could be moderate- to high-functioning."

"If he was high-functioning, Will, he wouldn't have escalated to killing, much less _as_ the animal he believes he embodies."

"Unless he was taught to control it."

Frederick's eyes widened. "You're thinking Hannibal 'cured' him by channeling his delusions. Reorienting him toward homicide as an outlet."

"Let's just say I wouldn't put it past him," Will said.

"I wouldn't put anything past him," said Frederick. "I really, really hate that man."

"You're not alone in that," said Will. "But at least you agree he's a man."

"As opposed to…?"

"As opposed to the Devil himself."

"If you're asking if I think he's a supernatural being of some sort, I assure you, I don't."

"No, no," Will said. "I took you for many things, but credulous isn't one of them."

"Oh, really?" Frederick asked. "And what, exactly, did you take me for?"

Will smiled and ducked his head. "Maybe someone with excessive confidence. At least in his own abilities. A proud man."

Frederick took a breath and bit the inside of his cheek. Before Hannibal—before he was framed—he _had_ been absolutely confident in his abilities. In his techniques. Now, sitting trapped in Will Graham's snowbound cottage, surrounded by a smelly sea of wiggling and sighing canines, he had to allow in the painful thought that he had merely been projecting that confidence. Pretending to be something he wasn't, and pretending so hard that he'd convinced himself. It took one push by Hannibal Lecter to send that careful construction tumbling, after all.

"I suppose you think I've gotten my just deserts," Frederick said. "The mighty brought low."

Will shook his head. "I don't resent you, Frederick. I resented my situation, which you were part of. But it was Hannibal who put me there. Same as you. He's leveled the ground between us."

"That's all well and good for you," said Frederick. "Your name is clear. I'm still being hunted, hiding here like an animal."

Will grinned. "Maybe that's a good thing."

"Are you joking?"

"I don't mean being made to hide," Will said. "I meant being an animal. Hannibal transformed Randall Tier, and look how much power he has."

Frederick pursed his lips. "That's not a terribly good example. He encouraged the man's psychosis."

"Or, if you look at it differently, he made him more himself. He did the same to me, after all."

"You're suggesting that it's my nature to cower?"

"Not at all," said Will. "I'm just suggesting that you may not know quite yet what the end result of your transformation will be."

"If it's anything more than a paranoid wreck, please do let me know." He fell into a frustrated silence.

Will was silent for a time, too, almost as if indulging Frederick's fit of self-pity.

"You know," Frederick said at last, "ancient civilizations believed more often than not that transformation was a punishment, not a gift."

"Ovid again?"

"Let's say it's been on my mind."

"What about Apollo and Daphne?" Will asked. "She begged the gods to save her from his lecherous advances, and they turned her into a tree."

"How is being stuck in one place forever a gift?"

"Looking at the current situation, point taken," said Will.

"And even if Tier's metamorphosis is a gift, animals don't have the power over humans that they used to."

"I disagree," said Will. "He's an animal who still looks like a man. He can hide in plain sight."

"The only way I could hide in plain sight is if I actually _were_ an animal," Frederick grumped. He was a little unsettled, thinking back to the dream in which he had turned into the large black dog. Even more unsettling was the sudden sense of kinship he felt with both Will and with Randall Tier. Lecter had transformed Tier into a beast, singularly focused on fulfilling his fantasy. Will, if his plan went through, would be his own brand of disguised threat.

So there was also a strange comfort in the thought: that somehow he was in a larval stage in his own transfiguration. That he might yet have some part to play in bringing Hannibal Lecter down.

Will interrupted his reverie. "Frederick," he said, "I think that's the first time I've seen you smile since you got here."

For the first time, Frederick thought he might actually be _glad_ to see Will go when he left that morning. The entire house reeked of that wretched aftershave. Despite the cold, Frederick threw open what windows he could reach. What was left when the cologne dissipated, however, was a low animal reek that Frederick was half-tempted to think Will tried to cover with his awful choice of toiletries. It seemed like more than just the dogs, though—something more _wild_.

The smell that lingers when everything human is removed.

Frederick shuddered, remembering the scent that had drifted toward him over the snow-clotted hillocks during his sleepwalking episode the other day. Wild, indeed.

Not because of cold, but because of the association, he shut the windows again. The bedroom window latched with a satisfying clack that almost, but not quite, covered the sound of a boot on the porch.

Frederick froze in a half-flinch, waiting in a parodic, heart-hammering, horror movie way for something else to happen. One of the boards on the front porch groaned. Frederick groaned, too. The last thing he thought before passing out was, _This is getting pathetic_.

He was immediately back up again, though. Well, not entirely up. Crawling, it seemed. He was breathing hard, nails clicking on the wood floor.

_Was he dreaming again_?

Sure enough, when he raised his head to the level of the glass, he could see two black canine eyes staring back at him from under a ridge of furred brow. The force of his terror at the possibility of being discovered sleepwalking by Will's mystery guest was enough to send him—dog or not—slapping belly-down to the floor.

The whine he heard deep in his own throat sounded like protest, though. The dog was in control again, and he rose on his haunches and sniffed the air. Like a faulty burglar alarm, the other dogs finally revved up enough and set to barking, something Frederick could see the visitor was ignoring as he walked into the living room on four tentative paws.

As if on cue, the dogs fell silent. He felt a stab of trepidation as they wheeled to face him. But they didn't circle or growl—only sat and stared. The human visitor was staring, too.

Before he could see her clearly, dog-Frederick could smell that it was a woman. She wore a much, much finer scent than did Will Graham, but he could also smell what lay underneath it—something both feminine and intrinsically _human_, light at the same time it was raw-edged and spicy. It bloomed like a fractal lattice across Frederick's field of vision: red-orange with a slow pulse.

It made dog-Frederick curious nearly to the point of frenzy. It made man-Frederick squirm, a not entirely un-delicious sensation.

He padded over to the windowsill and rose up to put his paws on its slight ledge, pressing a cold nose against colder glass. The woman had long, ash-brown hair and wide blue eyes. Her perfect brows drew in over a well-shaped nose...yes, okay, Frederick was laying it on a little thick in his head, but she _was_ a stunner.

"You're a big boy, aren't you?" said the woman, pressing an ungloved hand against the cold pane. Much to his humiliation, dog-Frederick licked at the slow-fading palm print. But it made her smile.

She rose and looked behind her, even though Frederick had not heard a thing. Buster wriggled up to his left hind paw and whined. The spell was about to break, and Frederick would have done anything at that moment to make it last.

"Maybe I'll see you again," the woman said. Then she was gone—jogging off the porch and into the snow—pulling on dark gloves that were probably kidskin. Dog-Frederick was entranced. Man-Frederick thought he might actually be in love.

Unfortunately, that intense attraction was driven to the back of his mind when Frederick awoke, completely naked, on the rug in Will's parlor. He lunged for the old afghan on the couch, whipping his head back and forth to make sure the woman was gone. Had she been there at all?

Frederick wrapped the ratty blanket around his waist and shuffled off in search of his clothes. He found them in the bedroom in a pile—as if he had simply evaporated out of them. Confusion made him sit down hard, feeling the cool air of the house on his bare shoulders, rubbing the material of his shirt between his fingers as if he expected himself to materialize back inside it.

"What the _hell_ is happening to me?" He was either teleporting or his sleepwalking dreams were getting more and more bizarre, and one of those was a much likelier explanation.

As if to offer reassurance, Buster trotted up and thwacked at Frederick's side with his nub of a tail. His hand went to the little dog's head of its own accord, scratching at the powdery soft fur behind its ears.

He looked at the hand like it had betrayed him. Independently moving limbs, insane mid-day stripping, hallucinating sexy women—ever since he'd come to Will Graham's house, Frederick felt more and more that he was losing control of either his body or his sanity. And one of those was a _much_ likelier explanation.

Shaken, he rose to his feet and picked up his sweater. A miniature snowfall of dark dog hair came free and filtered down to the floor in the watery winter light.

Frederick had not only changed his sweater but shoved it in the rattletrap washing machine before Will got back. He wanted every trace of that dark fur gone. How long had he been out? Obviously long enough for him to take off every stitch of clothing and have one of the dogs nest in it. He suppressed a little pang of irritation that it had been one of the other dogs and not...well, "his" dog, Buster.

_Clinical lycanthropy_. That was what Will had said about Randall Tier. Frederick might have indulged a thought or two about subconscious lycanthropy, but that was too much Freud and too much Jung smashed together in a very uneasy mix. Frederick had liked to think of himself as a progressive analyst. _Had_. Because that was a lifetime ago. And his own self-analysis was obviously inadequate.

"Did you dream?" he asked Will as he came in that evening carrying a load of groceries. "I mean, while you sleepwalked?"

"You should know that, Frederick," Will said.

"Listen, I was perfectly within my rights to think that they were delusions and hallucinations at the time," Frederick said, crossing his arms. He moved a single foot to walk over and help unload the groceries, but felt foolish and stopped.

"Yes," Will said. "Always the same thing."

Though it had been a ruse, toward the end of his incarceration Will had opened up a bit more to Frederick, giving him tantalizing hints at a complex psychological condition. The condition, of course, was still complex...just not in the way that Frederick had thought at the time.

"The stag," Frederick said.

"Got it in one."

Frederick scowled.

Will, holding a bag of apples, smiled. "I'm not making fun of you."

Frederick was silent, trying not to pout.

"So you're still sleepwalking," Will said.

"Either that or I'm having hallucinations and delusions of my own." Frederick couldn't help the note of desperation that crept into his voice.

"What are you seeing?"

"A dog."

Will turned his head, hiding behind a cough, but the cover didn't last for long. He cracked up.

"I'm glad it's funny to you," said Frederick.

"No, no," Will said. "It just makes sense. You're surrounded by dogs. Buster seems to have taken a liking to you."

Frederick fought down a blush that threatened to rise above his collar. "I am not dreaming about _your_ dogs."

"What's wrong with my dogs?" Will was desperately trying to keep a straight face.

"Nothing—" Frederick started. "Oh. Ha, ha."

"Is it the dog you saw behind my house? The one that left the rabbit?"

Frederick looked up, shocked that Will was suddenly taking him seriously. "No. It's another one."

"Are _you_ the dog?" Will asked. "I mean, in the dreams?"

"Were you the stag?"

"Some part of me was."

"Well, I— I think this dog _represents_ me, somehow." He decided to leave it at that; the truth was still too uncomfortable. Frederick had never been one of those people who grew wings or gills in their dreams. He had certainly never turned into a dog. "Like we talked about the other day. Hiding in plain sight." He thought about the woman at the window.

"Or wanting to," Will said.

"Or that. It would certainly be easier."

"Easy isn't on the menu with Hannibal out there."

Frederick didn't even try to hide it; he burst out laughing. "Hannibal," he said. "'On the menu.' Oh, God."

Will joined in.

"Well, that could be one explanation," said Frederick. "Hannibal doesn't prey on animals. So it seems safe to dream I'm one."

Will grinned. "I think you forgot one thing, though."

"What's that?" Frederick asked.

"Dogs are hunters, too."


	8. Chapter 8

If he thought about it, which he had more than ample time to do, Frederick could see it made sense. He was experiencing the very definition of a self-perpetuating cycle, and though he could see the symptoms he was reluctant to acknowledge the cause.

The truth was, though, Frederick was scared. He was more frightened than he had been in his life, and obviously Will's apparent vested interest in the protection of that life did very little to allay his fear. Terror produced fainting produced dreams produced terror and so on and so forth. If that could be subjectively seen by even a layman as "going nuts," then Frederick was doing so.

He became convinced of it on the night that the dream-woman came back. He had been sitting in the kitchen, thank God, finishing up a late-night cup of coffee when he heard the knock on the front door.

"Frederick!" Will hissed.

Frederick was already in the pantry, clutching the too-hot mug and trying not to whimper. He shook and spilled the coffee down the front of his sweater as he heard the door open.

"Can I help you?" Will said.

_Good. Not Crawford._ Frederick allowed himself to relax a little. But it was only a moment, until he heard the voice.

"You're Will Graham?"

It was a woman. And he _knew_ that voice, though it had only said one thing. _You're a big boy, aren't you?_ Frederick fumbled and nearly dropped the coffee mug, splashing more of the scalding liquid onto the linoleum.

"No way in _hell_," Frederick whispered.

"And may I ask who you are?" he heard Will say.

Again that voice. It was incredible. "My name is Margot Verger. You don't know me, but I believe we're seeing the same psychiatrist."

Frederick's eyes widened. Another patient of Lecter's. Honestly, the man was so invested in Will, Frederick had forgotten that Hannibal was still practicing. He had to wonder in exactly what way Lecter would endeavor to pervert Margot Verger's sense of self, as he had done with Will. As he had apparently done with Randall Tier.

The anger was on him just as suddenly as the irrepressible need to see her. To confirm her existence, even though it meant he was solidly out of his mind. Frederick set his mug on one of the wire shelves and pushed the pantry door open little by little. He sent a mental note of thanks out to the aether that Will was a bit of a handyman and kept his hinges oiled.

How he would be able to open the back door without being heard was another problem altogether, but Frederick would have to wing it. It was imperative that he see the dream-woman. Margot. An old-fashioned name. Singular. Frederick smiled before he remembered he was standing in the middle of Will Graham's kitchen looking for a way out into the accumulating snow.

"Can I offer you something to drink?"

The volume of Will's voice told Frederick he was about halfway to the kitchen. Panicked, he turned around and ran back into the pantry, wincing as his socks soaked up the now-chilled coffee.

"I have coffee," Will said. "A little bit of whiskey, though I'm not sure it's up to your standards, Miss Verger."

Luckily, Margot's voice still floated toward Frederick's ears from the front sitting room. "I think you'll find my standards are not what you expect, Mr. Graham."

To his credit, Will didn't flinch when he opened the pantry door and saw Frederick standing against the shelves with wide eyes and soggy feet. He only blinked a couple of times and shut the door. "I lied," Will said. "Out of coffee. Whiskey it is."

Frederick waited through the clinking of glasses (mismatched, no doubt) and up until he heard Will's footsteps receding down the hall once again. In his mad rush to get out of the pantry, Frederick's foot slipped on the puddle of coffee and he went sprawling onto the kitchen floor.

"What was that?" Margot asked.

"Dog," said Will.

Swearing under his breath, Frederick scrambled to his feet. He had his hand on the doorknob when he thought better of it and went to the window. He'd made the right choice; the pane whispered open, admitting a blast of cold air. Frederick pushed the screen out of the window frame, letting it land silently in the cottony pile of fresh powder below.

For some stupid reason, he had not expected it to be so cold when he tumbled out, landing on top of the fallen screen. Once he righted himself he was still thigh-deep in the frigid drifts. The night was soundless—no wind, the snow swirling in tight loops to the ground—so Frederick figured it was safe to leave the window open a crack. Toes already numb and fingers well on their way, he fumbled the pane down to just a couple of inches above the sill.

He lost his bearings momentarily in the snow-dampened night and had to cling to the wall of the house until he could see the wan glow of the porch light reflected off skittering snowflakes ahead. Then he began to slog toward the front of the house, hoping that a vantage point by the far window would put him at least out of Margot's line of sight, if not Will's as well.

He just had to see. _Just had to see_. And not pass out.

The chattering of his teeth sounded like shotgun blasts within the silence. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of his mad dash across Will's property with Jack Crawford on his heels. How long had it been? Days? Weeks? A year?

Frederick stopped right in his tracks when he realized he no longer thought about his little red roadster, his cashmere pullovers. The socks that were currently freezing to his feet were probably a polyester blend. Maybe the fusty old sociologists were right: fear does help one sort out one's priorities.

What is the indulgence of luxury but the pastime of the lonely? In the same measure that the thought stung, it also brought a little bit of pleasure when Frederick thought about Hannibal Lecter, alone and high atop his mountain of corpses. Thinking that Will had joined him only to have the proverbial rug pulled out from under him at some indeterminate point in the future.

_That's right_, Frederick thought. _Will doesn't care about you_.

And then: _Does he care about me?_

At that point—fortuitously as Frederick might later reflect—he lost his balance on feet numb as stones and toppled face-first into the snow. At first, Frederick thought he had fainted again and was dreaming, but realized that he, Frederick Chilton the man, was simply crawling through the drifts, trying to keep his head above them. He managed to get his feet under him again, and then the warm glow from the window was in view.

The light in the living room cast a perfect golden rectangle over the snow. Frederick crouched again and inched into its perimeter.

He could see Will, in profile. And...just a couple more inches...there she was.

His jaw dropped so fast that his teeth nearly froze. She was wearing a different outfit—a claret velvet equestrian jacket with a high-collared blouse and tall boots—all pieces of impeccable quality, but there could be no mistake that this was the same woman who had come to the house.

Frederick tried a lot of emotions out and discarded them one by one. He endeavored to feel terrified that Margot Verger might have caught on to Will's secret and was now trying to blackmail him in exchange for her silence. (Though someone with what was obviously a tailored designer wardrobe he could hardly imagine needed to blackmail an impoverished FBI consultant.) Failing that, Frederick tried to make his heart sink at the fact that he could in all likelihood add "psychic premonitions" to his laundry list of delusions.

But all he could do was watch Margot—the sweep of her aristocratic nose, the shine of her hair—and utterly forget his frozen limbs. The latent mythologist burst to the surface again. Frederick felt like Psyche viewing Cupid by lamplight. Everything was beautiful and forbidden and discomfort had fled in those few captured moments before the drop of hot lamp oil fell.

She turned toward the window.

Frederick dropped, then came up sputtering, spitting snow. For a few seconds he thought about going back around the side of the house and slipping back in the window, already afraid that he had done too much damage, but he was entranced. He raised his head once again, squinting into the glow. Will turned to look at the window, and his eyes widened.

When Margot's gaze followed his, Frederick had to slam his face into the snow again.

"Did you see something?" Margot asked.

Will grimaced his most insincere smile. "Light on the snow. Playing tricks."

Margot took a sip of her whiskey. "I know about tricks."

Frederick raised his head once more. He could feel the snow melting and re-freezing in his beard. Will was looking straight at him, tilting his head and widening his eyes. The look said, _What the hell are you doing?_

"Down," Will hissed.

Frederick groaned and flopped into the snow once more. When he looked up again, crystalline flakes in his eyelashes, all of Will's dogs were laying on their bellies around his feet.

"Down!" Will said again.

Frederick hit the snow. The dogs rested their heads on their paws.

"They're very well trained, Mr. Graham," Margot said.

"_Some_ of them are."

Frederick raised his head one more time.

"Go!" Will barked. "Into the kitchen. Go!"

Both Margot and Frederick flinched. The dogs, ever obedient, got up and began to straggle into the back of the house. As loath as he was to leave the lovely visage of Margot Verger behind, Frederick figured that was his cue. He tottered back to the kitchen, hauled up the window, and poured himself through it, landing hard on his shoulder on the linoleum.

He was still there, shivering in a ball when he heard the front door close and the noise of a car engine starting.

Will's footsteps headed back to the kitchen were heavy, ominous. "Are you _insane?_"

"Yes," Frederick said with absolute conviction.

That seemed to take Will aback. "Listen," he said after a pause, "I don't want to do any more explaining than I have to. Margot Verger is a wild card. What in hell were you thinking, Frederick?"

"I recognized her voice," he said. "I've seen her before."

"Where? At Hannibal's?"

_Right here at your house_, he thought. "No," said Frederick. "I can't remember."

"That's a hell of a lot of danger to put yourself in for the sake of someone you half-remember," Will said.

"Yes, but did you _see_ her?"

Will gave him a blank stare for a couple of seconds, then chuckled behind his hand. "Frederick. Have you got a crush?"

He harrumphed. "I have a very refined aesthetic."

Will dropped his hand and laughed out loud.

There was, of course, no way that Frederick was going to tell Will about the circumstances under which he'd first seen Margot Verger. To his relief, Will was more interested in divulging what she had said. Margot was indeed seeing Hannibal, apparently as part of a strategy to shrug off the yoke of her abusive and most likely psychotic brother, Mason. She was astute enough to sense, though, that something about Lecter wasn't quite on the up-and-up. At least that was the way Frederick chose to read it.

"Does she know about me?" Frederick asked.

"I'm pretty sure she doesn't know you're here," said Will, "and I don't think she cares who you are. Her focus is Hannibal."

"That makes three of us," Frederick said. He supposed he didn't have any right to be a little hurt by what Will had said about Margot not caring who he was, but the sting was there anyway. "I'm going to take a hot shower and go to bed." He got up, realizing his clothes were sopping wet and leaving a puddle on the floor. "Oh, well, I'll clean this up first."

"Thanks, Frederick."

Frederick was nearly struck dumb. "You're welcome?"

Will stood up as well, the dogs gathering at his heels. "Goodnight, Frederick."

"Wait. Will, wait." Frederick raised a dripping arm. "I'll take the couch tonight."

Will gave a soft smile and a brief nod and headed back into the darkness of the hallway.

Later, Frederick would call that offer either prescient or lucky, depending on how insane he would admit to being at the time.

Almost as soon as he settled down onto the surprisingly comfortable living room sofa he was slipping out of it again. The night, which should have been quiet, was positively _alive_ with sound. He could hear the huffing breath of each dog, even though they were all in the other room. Well, _nearly_ all of them. Buster's typically low-level snuffling sounded like an industrial fan.

Frederick went to the window. It had stopped snowing and the sky had cleared. Even the moonlight on the snow seemed to have a noise of its own: robust, crystalline, like a visible trumpet fanfare. For no reason at all, it made Frederick's mouth water.

He opened the door to a swirl of snow-coated air. Behind him, Buster raised his head.

"Fine," he said, raising an eyebrow. "Come on."

The little dog leapt from the couch and trotted behind Frederick, who closed the door behind them. Even through the bitter cold, the night had a smell. He recognized it from one of his prior dreams: dead vegetation and live, skittering little hearts.

And he _must_ be dreaming, yes? Because he was taking off his clothes. Buster, sitting on his haunches beside him, looked up for a cue. Dream-Frederick didn't stop stripping until all of his clothes lay in a pile on the front porch. The cold was an afterthought.

Then the entire world shivered and collapsed. Frederick hit the boards of the porch hard but instead of laying there he surged off the steps face-first into the snow. This time, he barely felt it, only on the pads of his paws.

_Paws?_

Oh, of course. If this was a dream, he was almost certainly the big black dog again. Free, empowered, incognito. Just for the hell of it, he wheeled and slunk around the side of the house to see if Margot was visiting his dream again. But no, the house was dark. He could see the blankets he left, the couch that had already breathed out the impression of his body.

Buster barked once, low.

Dog-Frederick chuffed back, and the little dog was quiet.

_I'm obviously alpha dog_, thought dream-Frederick, not without a considerable sense of triumph.

A sudden movement in the very corner of his eye made Frederick spin around and crouch low. It seemed to be a moving lump of snow, until it hopped in front of a leafless bush and Frederick could see pink eyes, a twitching nose.

There was a burst of mouthwatering scent, and it took dog-Frederick only a moment to realize that what he was smelling was fear. He moaned; it came out as a whine.

The rabbit froze in place, except for the trembling of its leaping heart. Frederick could almost hear it pulsing against the snow.

A branch snapped in the far distance. The rabbit turned, its quivering tail pointed toward Frederick. It may very well have been an icicle falling, but Frederick saw his chance. He was next to the bush in a couple of bounds; it took only a split second more and he had a mouthful of squealing meat. He was biting down before he realized it, bathing himself in silence and blood.

The snow that enveloped him was almost warm as he took his time tearing the steaming rabbit apart. He almost invited Buster to share, but the little dog would be lost in the snowdrifts. Instead, he sat patiently on the porch, shivering a little in the sharp moonlight.

As a token for his loyalty, dog-Frederick took back one of the rabbit's hind paws, laying it on the boards at Buster's feet. The smaller dog snatched it up and held it high as Frederick led the way back into the house.

It seemed as soon as he crossed the threshold he was human again, wondering at the terrible, metallic taste in his mouth. Oh, perhaps it wasn't _entirely_ terrible. He gave in to absent wondering as to whether he'd forgotten to brush his teeth.

It was then that the drop of bright blood fell, bright and accusatory, from his lips to the rug below. Frederick swiped his bare arm across his mouth. The rabbit's blood smeared his skin.

Shocked back into consciousness, or what felt like it, Frederick found himself standing stark naked in Will Graham's living room, the door open wide, his clothes piled on the porch. Worst of all was the swath of red on his forearm. Buster, sitting at his freezing feet, was gnawing on a stringy rabbit leg.

Frederick's mouth dropped open, but he shut it just as quickly, smelling his own blood-scented breath. It was no nightmare this time—he had stripped down on Will's porch and walked naked out into the snow...and killed something.

He thought for a moment that it could have been something already dead, but the thought was even more loathsome.

_Clinical lycanthropy_. The thought was inescapable. Just like Randall Tier, Hannibal Lecter had somehow managed to make Frederick into a literal animal.

He yanked the rabbit's foot out of Buster's jaws and tossed it out the door. The little dog looked positively betrayed. Leaving his clothes on the porch, Frederick made a dash for the shower. It was only after he had been standing under the spray for a good while that he realized any raw meat he had might have eaten was sitting in his stomach without a single complaint.


	9. Chapter 9

Frederick wanted to take a walk. Or, rather, he felt like he _had_ to. He couldn't bear the thought of Will wandering his property with the dogs and seeing the evidence of the night's slaughter—as if the pattern of the blood alone could incriminate him.

"I'm going to get some air," he announced after breakfast, pulling on the coat that Will had bought for him.

Will raised his eyebrows. "Care if you have company?"

Frederick's eyes widened. He began to stammer before he could stop himself. "Uh, I'd...I'd rather...I need some time to think."

Will smiled. "I didn't mean me. I'm hardly dressed for it." He indicated his bare feet. "I wondered if you wouldn't mind taking the dogs. I promise they don't talk much."

Frederick exhaled his relief. "Oh. Of course. Sure."

Taking a sip of his coffee, Will said, "You okay?"

"Didn't sleep well. Bad dreams."

"Huh," Will said, smiling. "I know that feeling."

As soon as Frederick reached the door the dogs began dancing around his feet, sending little chuffs and yips into the air like a round of applause. In a way, Frederick could see why Will liked living with these creatures. Nearly everything one did drew instant canine accolades. As grudging as it was, he admitted that Buster's adulation certainly served as a necessary ego boost.

He just wasn't sure it was enough.

Walking through the crisp snow, squinting into the midmorning light, Frederick remembered standing underneath the spray of a shower so hot he could barely stand it, his skin pink as the bloody water that swirled down the drain. He had gotten on hands and knees and scrubbed the tile with acrid bleach after he had finished, his eyes watering both from the stench and from his helpless frustration.

Will had seemingly slept through all of it, at least that was what Frederick had hoped as he'd wandered back out to the living room, barefoot and frigid. The icebound air on the porch had been bracing, enough to slap him out of any residual slumber. As he had collected his clothes once again, his hair had frozen in spikes and swirls. (Without his weekly trip to his swank barber, his hair had begun to go long, starting to swerve into curls that Frederick had tried very hard to tame in his former life.)

That life was as thoroughly scrapped and ragged as the remains of the rabbit, which Frederick could see were marked by a peculiar and unsettling savagery as he crested the hill. Blood, still preserved and bright in the cold, was strewn in expressionistic spatters across a mound of disturbed snow. A stiff line of crystallized entrails stretched across the mound to a hole on the far side. Frederick looked inside it and regretted it immediately: there he saw the rabbit's head, eyes glazed and tongue protruding.

"Eugh."

Still, he tried to muster nausea but found he could not. Maybe living closer to the land, where such a cycle of life was unavoidable, had dulled his fine senses a bit. The thought was not entirely unpleasant. Also welcome was the near-certainty that he had not affected this carnage. There was no way a man could rip apart a rabbit like that with his bare hands. He had probably been following the other, wild dog—or an idea of it—in his sleep and had come upon its latest meal. If he believed himself to be a dog at the time, owing to his dream, he very well could have picked the corpse up, getting blood all over himself.

That he'd had blood in his mouth he conveniently ignored in his well-earned relief.

Of one thing he was one hundred percent certain, though: the sleepwalking was far too dangerous to continue. Were he back at the office, he could simply have prescribed himself klonopin or trazodone and been done with the whole mess. Of course, if he were back at the office, chances were good none of this would be happening.

As for the danger, the very least of it was ending up with frostbite on his extremities. If he was gallivanting about naked at this point, he could lose other very important parts...not that he'd had a chance to use them in a while. The thought made Frederick ache a little with self-pity. How often had he told himself that he was far too busy for a love life when, in fact, the reason for his abstinence was simply that the field of candidates was empty?

And then Margot Verger...oh, Margot. She had rekindled something inside him. Without knowing whether it was possible or plausible or even advisable, he _had_ to see her again.

Frederick's reverie was interrupted by the bump of a canine nose directly in his crotch. Looking down, he saw not only an eager mutt but the fact that he would have to stay out in the cold just a little longer in order to avoid embarrassing himself.

Later in the night, if he had the wherewithal to think about it, Frederick would have regretted the glass of cheap whiskey he shared with Will. It dulled his senses, which were already fooling him enough as it was.

But the pungent alcohol in its cheap mug reminded him of the way Margot's tongue touched the rim of the cup just before her lips did. Every time she took a sip it was the same: flick of a tongue, then lips. Frederick placed the mug under his nose and inhaled, imagining what perfume she might wear. Nothing ostentatious or commercial. Clive Christian, perhaps. Or Annick Goutal. The scent would fall around him in waves just before the curtain of her hair slipped over his cheeks…

"Frederick?"

Frederick nearly dropped his whiskey. "Huh?"

Will laughed. "You looked lost in space there for a second."

Frederick sighed. "Not just a second."

"Those dreams are really getting to you, huh?"

"I'd say you have no idea, but I doubt that's the case."

"Do you think you're sick?" Will asked. "I mean, physically."

"Like you were?"

Will nodded.

"No. I don't think so," Frederick said. "In fact, I'd venture to say if it weren't for the dreams that I've never felt better. Uh, _physically_."

Will raised an eyebrow. "And mentally?"

Another sigh, this one rippling the surface of the whiskey in the cup. "To be honest, I feel like I'm outside my body half the time. When for the first time in as long as I can remember, _inside_ my body is where I want to be."

Frederick looked down at his lap, but when he raised his head Will was smiling. "I think you're more in your mind than you believe," he said.

"Reflecting on my inner nature?" Frederick rolled his eyes.

Will shrugged. "Having your inner nature reflected _to_ you."

"Even if I knew what you were getting at, I'd still say that sounds a lot like a failure of self-control," Frederick said.

"You've always been very invested in control," said Will. "Maybe obsessively so. It's only natural that something like this would happen if that was taken away from you."

"I see," said Frederick. "The old Jack London effect—strip away all the trappings of comfort and reveal the true measure of the man."

"The great literary struggle," said Will. "So, how do you measure up?"

"Ironically," said Frederick, knocking back the last swig of the whiskey with a grimace, "I feel powerless inside my body, and powerful inside my mind. As a diagnostician, unfortunately, I would say that is as close to dissociation as one gets without 'losing time.'"

"And you don't lose time."

"No. I just...I experience it differently. Uh, sometimes. When I dream."

Will's smile widened. "Don't we all?"

There came a sharp snap from outside in the snow somewhere. The dogs raised their heads. Buster, who was warming Frederick's sock-clad feet, gave a low growl.

"It's okay," said Will.

"It might not be," Frederick said.

Another snap, a thick branch breaking. Buster yipped and sprang up, body tense and tail straight out.

"Stay here," Will said, getting out of his chair.

"Will, don't—"

When Will opened the door, Buster charged the screen door, knocking it open with a firm head-butt and charging out into the night. The only thing visible in the snow for the few feet that the porch light covered was his quivering tail.

"Buster!" Frederick shouted.

A brief silence, then the little dog could be heard barking faintly.

"He must be way the hell out there," Will said. He pulled on his coat. "Stay here."

Frederick hovered, his butt half out of the chair, until he heard a sharp yelp from outside. Then he heaved up to his feet and ran to the coat rack. He yanked on his coat and was pulling on his boots with shaking fingers when Will barreled through the shrieking screen door with Buster in his arms.

Time almost seemed to stop as Frederick watched a bright drop of blood slid from the dog's lacerated haunch and splashed to the floor. Frederick touched his mouth on instinct, though the rabbit's blood was long gone.

Will knelt and put Buster on the rug. The dog whined. Will shooed away the other dogs and Frederick crouched beside him. The white fur was interrupted by a slash of black that wept blood in a lazy line. At least the flow was sluggish.

"It doesn't look deep," Will said.

"I _told_ you!" Frederick said. "I knew there was another dog out there."

"I don't think a dog did this," Will said. "This looks like a knife. Or a claw."

"A _claw_?"

Will gathered Buster into his arms again. "Let's get him into the kitchen where we can see better."

The dogs followed at Frederick's heels as he trailed Will into the adjoining room.

Neither of them saw the shape in the window when they flicked on the light. But in a bare moment the kitchen was engulfed in a hailstorm of shattering glass. Will stumbled back and fell, clutching Buster.

Frederick was conscious long enough to see the thing that had come through the kitchen window. It was right out of a horror story—long, white bones flexing without tendons; a ribcage that seemed no less alive for its lack of breath-fueled heaving; an enormous sightless head that was all maw, wide open and ready to snap on the first available tender bit.

Then he fell into a faint again, with pronounced disappointment this time. Oh, well. At least he wouldn't feel it while he was being disemboweled. But out of his faint the dream-dog sprang up again, growling and shrieking along with the other dogs.

He smelled the man underneath the nightmare contraption before he saw him, because he was dressed in black, his face painted over. Then—only then—could Frederick see the exposed parts: a flash of white below the chin, a gap in the high neck of the man's shirt, showing pale flesh over a pulse that leapt and skittered like the doomed rabbit from the night before.

Buster went tumbling out of Will's arms as the beast bounded in, digging its claws into the wood. Will staggered back, a set of crushing jaws shutting over the thin air where his head had been only moments prior.

Frederick could have sworn Will was looking right at him in the split second before he actually shouted his name. He turned his head away, toward the monstrosity on the dining table.

_I hope I'm dying with a little dignity_, he thought.

Dream-dog-Frederick got down on his haunches and, before he could stop himself, leapt toward that sliver of uncovered skin on the man-beast's neck. He fully expected to bounce off the exoskeleton and be thrown yelping to the floor, helpless to watch as Will was rent limb from limb. But at the last second the creature reared up—the man coming to a crouch in order to pounce—and Frederick closed his own snapping teeth over the man's throat.

The sudden torrent of blood was unexpected; Frederick let go, hacking and choking, throwing a fine, pink mist up into the air from his drenched snout. His paws scrabbled on the now-slippery table and he thumped off of it and onto a pile of screaming canines. He hoped, absently, that he hadn't hit Buster and made the poor dog's night worse.

The bone-creature looked to be tearing at its own injured throat, but it was just the man trying to hold his claw-bound hands to the wound. It did little good. He vomited black blood over the lip of the table, then collapsed, the enormous bone jaws pulling the limp head over the edge.

Everything smelled and tasted of blood. Now, even dog-Frederick could summon the nausea he had failed to bring up before. He got up on his haunches and retched, spattering his dinner over his hands.

_Hands_?

Frederick sat back on his knees and raised those bloody, stinking hands before his eyes in utter disbelief. To his left there came a sharp hiss—an intake of breath. He turned to see Will clutching at his ragged plaid shirt, eyes wide with terror. But Will was not looking at the fallen monster drooling flumes of blood from his dining room table. He was looking at Frederick.

He tried to say Will's name, but what came out was a croak and a stream of bloody mucus. Will flattened himself against the wall behind him. "Get away," he said.

Frederick's vision swam and he toppled over onto the carpet before everything went black.


	10. Chapter 10

There was something in his eyes—something sticky and black that had begun to flake. Blinking felt like closing his eyelids over an expanse of sand.

It was the smell that hit him next, a raw, charnel-house reek.

_I'm dreaming_.

The air was very still and very cool.

Through the miasmic veil over his vision, he saw his own hands. They, too, were flaking. Frederick tried to wiggle his fingers, but they wouldn't obey. He flexed other muscles, feeling as if he were inside a second skin, emerging to cold and pain and light.

In the few moments before he realized he was naked, he saw that his hands were bound with bright orange cord, the digits swelling and going numb. Frederick made a noise that might have been an attempt at speech.

"Don't move," came a voice from above him.

"Okay." The word sounded like cement and tasted like it, too. "Okay."

"Frederick, can you see me?"

"Will? I can't see much of anything. There's something...on me."

"It's blood, Frederick. Turn your head and look at me."

Wincing as the crisp hairs on the back of his neck snapped free from his skin, Frederick dragged his cheek along the wood floor and strained to see the man sitting on the chair in front of him. He looked instead into the black bore of a pistol, and couldn't help flinching back, making the electrical cord around his wrists tighten further.

"If you do it again, I'll put a bullet between your eyes,"

"Do _what_?" Frederick blinked madly to clear his vision. Chunks of dried blood dangled from his lashes.

Will chambered a round.

"Jesus Christ!" Frederick shrieked. "Okay, okay! Whatever it is, I won't do it." He tried and failed to raise his blood-engorged fingers in helpless supplication.

"Do you remember what happened?" Will asked.

"I had this dream...this—but it wasn't a dream."

Will shook his head, at the same time lowering the pistol just a little.

Frederick tried to breathe without gasping. There was a knot of terror pulled tight in his gut, and entwined with it were strands of something else. Disgust? Satisfaction? He squirmed on the hard floor, suddenly self-conscious. "That was Randall Tier, wasn't it?"

"Yes," Will said.

"He's dead."

"Yes."

"In my dream, I—oh, god." Tears began to prickle at the corners of Frederick's eyes. To his horror and humiliation, a fat one broke free and ran over the bridge of his nose, cutting a trail through the blood on his face. "Did I...did I kill him?"

Will hesitated, but only for a split second. "Yes."

A raw sob coughed out of Frederick's chest. "Oh, Jesus. Oh, no." The tears flowed freely now. If he had been able to see Will's face, he would have seen it contorting in sympathy, but only the dark, dancing punctuation mark of the pistol's end swam up through his watery vision. "Do you think I killed those agents? At my house? I must have. Oh, god, I must have."

"Frederick," Will said, nudging Frederick's forearm with the toe of his boot. His tone was gentler. "Stay with me."

"Did I kill them, Will? Please."

"I don't think you did, Frederick. I really don't."

He took a great, shaky breath, licking his dry lips and bringing up the gunmetal taste of blood. Frederick remembered how that great gush had tasted, flooding his palate. It tasted the way he imagined Hannibal felt when he killed. When he carved up and served his victims to his high-society guests. Frederick tried again for nausea and failed, even though he was encased in the slowly drying caul of Randall Tier's blood. "How did I do it? Tier, I mean. Do you remember?" He asked the question even though he was afraid of the answer.

Will, as always, responded without prevarication. "You used your teeth."

Frederick could have sworn that the pistol inched closer to his face. "Oh, dear Christ. Will, you have to turn me in. I'm going crazy. I've _gone_ crazy. I'm a danger to people. I'd rather be sedated in my own hospital than keep doing this."

"I'm glad you did it," Will said.

Frederick felt the air knocked out of his lungs. "_What_?"

"It was Hannibal. He sent Tier to kill me."

"Why the...What would he…?"

"While I was in the hospital," Will said, "still under your care, if you can call it that."

For once, Frederick was too shattered to even feel affront. "What? What did you do?"

"I sent someone to kill Hannibal. Your orderly. Brown. As you can probably guess, he failed."

"You would...actually turn yourself into a killer? For Hannibal's sake?"

Will swiped the back of his wrist across his sweating brow. Frederick watched the trajectory of the gun as he did so. "I wasn't thinking clearly in those days. My only comfort was resentment. The need for vengeance."

"And you've gotten _over_ that? Pardon me if I don't believe you."

"No, not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. I only intend to play the game by Hannibal's rules, now that I see what they are. Now that I can beat him. Or, at least, that _was_ my plan until you came along and turned everything on its head."

"By killing Tier? I don't understand."

At this, Will's lips curled into a small, inexplicable smile. "What do _you_ remember about tonight? I need you to tell me everything."

Taking a deep breath, Frederick replayed the few, scattered shards of memory he could dig from his blasted brain. The demon-beast crashing through the window. Losing consciousness. Surging upward as the dream-dog. The snap of tendons within his jaws. "I thought—I thought I had passed out. Trust me, it's a very Frederick Chilton thing to do." No point avoiding self-deprecation when one was just about as low as one could get. "But I saw myself...not as myself but as a, well, a _dog_. The dog I keep dreaming about. Now do you see why I need to turn myself in? I'm hallucinating, dissociating. I lost time in this idiotic, fear-fueled delusion and _killed_ someone, Will."

"I agree with the last part of that."

"What part?"

"The fact that you killed someone. But if you hadn't, I would have tried for myself."

"So what do you not believe?"

"I don't believe it was a delusion, Frederick. You say you saw yourself turn into a dog." Will leaned closer, causing Frederick to shrink back as the gun also moved closer. "That's what I saw, too."

"You what?"

"I stood there," he gestured toward the far wall with the pistol, "and I watched you turn into a dog. Or something like that."

"No," said Frederick. He shut his eyes. "The last thing I need is you validating my delusions. I'm sick, Will. Sicker than I ever thought."

"If you're delusional, then so am I," Will said. "Because I know what I saw. The only reason I have this gun on you is for my protection."

Frederick heaved a phlegm-laden laugh before he could stop himself. "Just in case I turn into a dog and rip _your_ throat out?"

Will's stolidity spoke of its own accord.

"You—you're _serious_," Frederick said, beginning to babble. "I knew it. I knew I shouldn't have let you out of the hospital. You're sick; you've made me sick. I think—I think you and Hannibal are in it together. That's what I think. Conspiring to make me go crazy. To make me into your puppet, your creature. I'm an idiot! I'm a fool!"

"You're not a fool, Frederick. You're something neither myself nor Hannibal ever could anticipate."

"What am I?" Frederick was on the verge of tears once again. "Tell me, Will. Because I don't even know anymore."

Will bit his lip. Frederick could have sworn there was something a little impish behind the gesture. But then Will's expression grew as grave as that of any doctor delivering news of a terminal illness. "I think...you're a werewolf."

It was possibly the fact that Frederick _hadn't_ laughed outright that made Will agree to untie him. He winced at the tingle of returning blood flow to his fingers when the taut cord was loosened. Only when Frederick was freed did Will seem the least bit abashed that he was looking at a naked man splattered with blood.

"You may want to shower," Will said.

Frederick unfolded his cramped legs and stood, placing his hands over his groin. "Are you going to hold a gun on me while I do it?"

After a pause, Will shook his head. "I'm going to figure out what to do with this." He gestured to the table.

Given the conversation that had just occurred, Frederick felt oddly detached from the sight that greeted him. Tier's exoskeleton, which had been menacing when animated, was a sad heap of bones, its artificial tendons slack. Aside from the blood, which stretched in a great, tacky pool over the wood, Tier's motionless body was serene. Frederick was perturbed that their attacker lay face-down and he didn't see any evidence of his purported attack.

_You used your teeth_.

"I want to see it."

"See what?" Will asked.

"The wound. The, uh, bite. I want to see it."

"I don't think that's a good idea."

Leaving only one hand cupping his crotch and freeing the other to gesture toward the corpse so he could at least retain a modicum of civilized decorum, Frederick raised his chin and said, "If you're worried I might faint, I promise you I won't."

"I can't be sure of that," Will said. "Remember what happens when you pass out."

"It can't possibly happen every time."

"I'd rather not take that chance right now. I don't want to have to shoot you."

"I don't want you to shoot me, either!"

"Then go take a shower. Get dressed. I'm going to have a look. If nothing else, I can tell you how the wound appears, at least from a non-medical standpoint."

"That's not good enough." Frederick was almost pouting, then a flashbulb of recognition popped in his head. "Wait! I can prove to you I don't attack people every time I, well, pass out. Remember how I told you that I knew Margot Verger from somewhere? It was here. I knew her from right here. She came to the house one day when you were out on a case. I thought it was a dream, but she _had_ to have been here. She was looking down at me, looking at me like I was one of the dogs. She didn't see a man there at all! She said—" Frederick paused.

"She spoke to you?"

"Not exactly. It was, um, like you'd talk to a dog."

"What did she say?"

If at any moment in his life Frederick could be glad of a literal facefull of blood covering his flushed cheeks, this was it. He returned his other hand to cover his groin and looked down at the blood-soaked boards of the floor. "She said, 'You're a big boy, aren't you?'" Frederick cringed and clenched his teeth.

Will did not respond.

Frederick expected when he looked up to see Will staring at him, but when he dared open his eyes the other man was also looking at the floor, mashing his knuckle against his mouth, his shoulders shaking in silent laughter.

"Oh, go ahead," Frederick said, rolling his eyes.

Will threw his head back and laughed. The dogs, who had begun to creep in from the adjoining room, flinched and whined. "I'm sorry," Will said, struggling to gain control once again. "I'm really sorry. It's just—"

"No," Frederick said. "This is what my life has become. Absurdity punctuated by terror. Or maybe the other way around."

Will held a finger up, signaling silence. "Wait. Terror. When do you say you pass out and dream about becoming the wolf?"

"I'm not a wolf."

"You'd rather be a dog?"

"I'd rather not be either!"

"Just answer the question," Will said.

"Well, when I feel threatened, which I most certainly did when our eviscerated friend here came through the window."

"And when Margot came to the house for the first time."

"Yes," Frederick said. "You can imagine I wasn't keen on being discovered."

"But not the second time she came," Will said.

Frederick shuffled his bare feet. "I suppose that time I was more...intrigued."

"And you become the wolf when you sleep?"

"Yes, I told you that."

"Are you seeing what I'm getting at here?"

Frederick gave a helpless shrug.

"It's entirely unconscious. You're scared or in danger, or your subconscious has the reins, you turn. You're like the Incredible Hulk."

"The what?"

Will smiled. "Don't worry about it. Come on, be a psychiatrist. It means the wolf is essentially your id."

"Don't get Freudian with me."

"I'm standing in my kitchen talking about dreams with a naked, blood-covered man. It doesn't get much more Freudian than that," Will said.

"Gah," said Frederick. "Fine. So when my ego is in control, I'm a man. When I'm running on instinct, I'm a…_wolf_."

"Exactly," said Will. "And that's dangerous. Now you understand the reason for the gun. But, listen, the Hulk learned to control his rage."

"I still don't understand who you're talking about."

"You never read comics as a kid?"

"I went to boarding school," Frederick said, as if it explained anything.

"What I'm saying, essentially, Frederick, is that I think you can teach yourself to control this. Turn wolf whenever you want, by your own volition. Not just on instinct."

"I've never felt less in-control in my life." Frederick's tone was close to a whine again.

Will took a swift step forward, closing the distance between them. Frederick stumbled back, but Will kept coming.

"Now, who was that arrogant, self-assured prick who ran the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane? Do you remember him? Because I sure do."

"You thought I was a prick?"

"Never mind. The point is, I know you a lot better now, Frederick. Back then, you seemed like a coward who lorded over the pathetic creatures in his charge, but lesser men would have crumbled long ago and gone running back to Jack Crawford, begging to be put in chains. You're stronger than you think."

Frederick's breath caught in his throat; his eyes burned. _No. I would give my right leg not to cry at this moment._ He sniffled hard and refocused his attention on Will, giving a stiff nod. "Thank you."

"Which is good, because I have a plan." Will's grin was almost feral. "A design, if you will."


	11. Chapter 11

When Frederick emerged from what might have been the longest shower of his lifetime (painstakingly picking dried bits of biomatter out of one's ear canals and from under one's ill-kept nails should not be a trial through which any civilized man should go), Will was still working in the dining room.

The burst window was sealed against the cold and the blowing snow with a piece of cardboard, but all the hairs on Frederick's body prickled up at the residual chill. The heap of bones, gears, and springs that Tier had worn Will had discarded in a corner, its menace deflated. Frederick could see the man (_the man he'd killed_) wasn't particularly large or imposing. Still, Tier's dead eyes were open wide and going cloudy. His chin rested against the tabletop, neck bent at a hideous angle because of all the tissue missing from his neck.

"We may have to take the floor up," Will said, giving a forlorn look at the blood-imbued boards. "I can say I'm remodeling."

"Whatever you need," Frederick heard himself say. He bent to retrieve the blood-spattered shirt out of which he, in wolf form, had apparently jumped, and draped it over Tier's face.

"I wouldn't bother," Will told him. "I'm going to cut it off."

"His _head_?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"To give to Hannibal."

"A riposte?" Frederick asked.

"A gesture of good faith. In order for my plan to work, I still need to appear to be on his side."

"I thought you had changed your mind on that idiotic notion. Because of me."

"You're a wild card right now, Frederick," Will said. "You need some time. Time to learn to control your gift."

"Whatever this is, Will, I assure you it is _not_ a gift."

Will smiled. "If it lets you take Hannibal down and clear your name, how is that not a gift?"

Frederick opened his mouth to speak but, regrettably, Will's words made too much sense to allow for a snappy comeback. "So, are you ever going to let me in on this plan of yours?"

"Suffice to say it involves you and Hannibal in a room while you're...not yourself."

Frederick's eyes widened, forcing on him an unpleasant memory of Randall Tier's dead, bulging eyes. "You're not going to bring him _here_?"

Will huffed a laugh. "No. That wouldn't do anything to prove you're not the Ripper. You'd have to leave the house to avoid being, uh, _put down_. You'd still be on the run."

"You could say one of your other dogs did it."

"I'm not risking them."

"But you're risking me!"

"As it stands, Frederick, you're the only one who can set this to rights," Will said. "Time to man up. Or wolf up, as the case may be."

"Oh, very funny."

"Listen, I'm making my own sacrifices. You'll only have to be close to Lecter once. I need to ingratiate myself. I need to build trust, and that's going to take a while."

"And what do you suggest I do in the meantime?"

"For starters, I'd say you should study up on your condition."

The first order of business, though, was to tend to Buster. The scratch Tier had inflicted on him was indeed superficial and the dog had set about cleaning it, smearing burgundy saliva on the white fur surrounding the laceration. Frederick tried to pretend that he didn't also feel the urge to lick Buster, but he couldn't hold back a brief whine of sympathy.

Man-Frederick still couldn't bring himself to watch as a placid Will used a hacksaw to sever Randall Tier's spine between the second and third cervical vertebrae. He only knew that was the chosen spot because Will narrated the entire procedure. Cutting the head so close below the mandible would effectively disguise cause of death, paring away the ragged strips of flesh left from Frederick's attack. Tier could have been shot for all Hannibal would know, or so Will hoped. No doubt the sick bastard would ask for his very own narration of the events.

After the head had been severed and placed aside, Will asked Frederick to steady the legs of the dining room table as he sawed each one off in turn, making it easier to fit the entire thing out the back door. The remainder of Tier's body would go with it—quite the convenient fuel for the pyre on which Will planned to burn the body. Few people blinked an eye at setting fallen deadwood ablaze in the deep country. However, no bonfire would burn hot enough to reduce the bones to ash, so Will would have to rake them out of the embers and place them in the wood-burning potbelly furnace downstairs.

This he told Frederick in a conversational tone. Frederick, for his part, was not sure that he could ever be as much of a danger to Will as Will could be to him. Not a good idea to cross someone who constantly thinks about how to kill people. Despite any solid claim of self-defense, Frederick knew he would have Randall Tier's death on his conscience from that night onward. He wondered if Will would have had the same moral compunction. The thought gave him what he feared at first to be the primordial shiver of the flesh that preceded a transformation. Turned out he was just thoroughly creeped out.

The feeling refused to abate as he and Will watched Randall Tier's body blacken and shrink in on itself atop the makeshift pyre. The initial stench of gasoline gave way to a more earthy and disturbing reek as Tier's organs sizzled and his remaining blood boiled. Frederick's eyes stung; he drew the back of his hand across his chin when he felt a warm trickle there. But it wasn't a tear. His mouth was watering.

Muscles tensing, he was poised to run back through the blank snowscape to the house, which was lit like a ship on a frozen sea. But Tier's head stood sentry back there, draped in Frederick's blood-spattered jacket, set out on the porch so the dogs wouldn't worry at it while he and Will completed their grisly task.

Frederick looked over at Will through the screen of the dancing flames. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted, and he looked to be swaying a little on his feet, though that could merely be the effect of the flickering light. The thought reappeared unbidden in Frederick's mind: maybe Hannibal Lecter had just cause to be afraid of Will Graham. But now didn't he have equal cause to fear Frederick? Lecter was wily, but he was faced with two opponents, each of which was an unknown quantity to him, and should one fail the other could take up the slack. It was ironclad. Wasn't it?

Frederick wiped his mouth again and looked up, watching the column of smoke dissipate and the view give way to high, cold stars.

Will had been adamant that he deliver his gift to Hannibal that very night. After Will had tipped the bundle containing Tier's head into a plastic garbage sack, tossed it in the passenger seat of his station wagon, and set off toward Baltimore, Frederick opened Will's laptop and stared at the glowing screen. Its glare was white, clean, comforting. Not the ruddy and tainted light from the fire out back, which still smoldered in the thick, pre-dawn darkness.

He settled into the wing chair in the sitting room. After a while, Buster limped in, his flank shining with antibiotic ointment, and settled between Frederick's sock-clad feet with a low groan of contentment.

All of the top search results brought up when Frederick typed in "lycanthropy" had to do with a delusion. He swallowed hard and looked up "werewolf" instead. The clinical condition did not seem to be nearly as diverse as the _literal_ condition. Depending on the lore and the location, there were as many iterations and explanations as anyone could think of. Some lycanthropes were men one minute and wolves the next, indistinguishable from the sharp-toothed, sheep-stealing nightmares that haunted pastoral hills. Others seemed to take on only some characteristics of the animal: fur, fangs, claws. Hideous half-and-half malformations like Lon Chaney's Wolfman. Though that might have scared the bespoke trousers off Hannibal Lecter, Frederick was glad that what he seemed to be experiencing was a total transformation. Excess body hair, up to the point that he'd been forced to hide away in Will's cabin, was not part of his aesthetic. He used to visit a discreet salon every two weeks to have his chest waxed. Driven to self-consciousness, he fastened the top button of his henley, his fingers brushing the few curls speckling the flesh over his sternum.

According to a few traditions, lycanthropes could change at will. Others did so only at night, or under a full moon, or on their birthdays. Some were cursed to remain in wolf form forever. According to his research (if this could be called "research" and not the utter folly it felt like), the cause of true lycanthropy was a curse, or a misdeed. Neither of these sat well with Frederick. If misdeeds could perpetuate a curse, he was well and truly buggered.

Most legends seemed to attribute the change to a bite from another werewolf. It was the closest approximation Frederick could find...provided, of course, that the "dog" he had faced down while trying to evade capture by Jack Crawford had been somewhat more than it seemed. It made the most sense, outside of the fact of the bite. Or, rather, that there hadn't been one. Frederick remembered the torn sleeve of his coat, the shredded shirt beneath, blood with no discernible source. And, very clearly, the lack of any wounds on his person.

On about the third page of search results, he made a discovery that served as food for thought—and likely the action that followed—were he to have any time later for musing in retrospect. A web page with poorly rendered graphics nonetheless informed him that the werewolf could spontaneously heal, provided that the wound was not made by a silver implement. Only a pure silver knife or a pure silver bullet could truly kill a werewolf, according to the amateurish purple text. Frederick felt a brief surge of triumph, attended quickly by guilt: Randall Tier had wanted to change his form, but at the end he hadn't been able to. He had been murdered by his aspirations. Or, it could be said, his hubris. Perhaps that made him a fitting tool for Hannibal, and a fitting mirror for Hannibal's own end. The thought managed to embolden Frederick.

_What if I was bitten, but healed before I woke up?_

His heart rate picking up, Frederick abandoned the laptop and went to inspect his face in the bathroom mirror. Could he remember having cut himself shaving while here at Will's house? Had the cuts simply disappeared before he had time to notice? He undressed and checked his skin for bruises, but his body was uniformly fish-belly white, unblemished. Checking to see that Will had not returned home, Frederick stood and examined that body. Muscles that had begun to sag with disuse and age (oh, weren't the forties a bitch?) seemed to have tightened. His small paunch had definitely shrunk. True, the hair on his forearms, his lower legs, and his chest was a bit thicker than it may have been before, but none of it seemed out of place.

_Somebody could look at this, objectively, and think_...I like it. _Even_...I want to touch it. _Someone with long chestnut hair and_...

Oh, no, no. It was the precise worst time to be thinking about Margot Verger. When, really, was a good time, though? She was an unfulfilled dream, like most missed liaisons in Frederick's uninspired romantic history. He re-dressed himself and fled the bathroom, sitting down hard in the wing chair.

Useless fugitive celibate coward.

Excuse me: Useless fugitive celibate _werewolf_ coward.

Frederick barked an ugly laugh, drawing a frightened yip from Buster. While it was an activity that Frederick might have made an afternoon of when he was back in his previous life, wallowing in pity seemed worse than useless at the moment. He ground his teeth together, sprang up from the chair, and snatched Will's copy of Ovid back off the shelf.

Frederick fanned out the pages of the book and, before he could lose his nerve, pinched a page between his first and second fingers, the paper's edge just indenting the sensitive webbing between those fingers. And he pulled.

"Ow!"

The paper cut stung immediately and badly. Frederick dropped the book, clutching his hand and staggering back to the bathroom sink.

"That was stupid, Frederick," he told his shame-flushed reflection. "Stupid!"

Blood had already begun to leak from between the digits as he ran his hand under cold water. He raised the hand up to the mirror and gingerly pushed the fingers apart. Bright redness welled in a sizable valley cut into his flesh. Frederick swore, using a term he would not normally have used under even the most dire circumstances. Another rivulet of blood slipped down his palm and he lowered the hand underneath the tap again. When he brought it up, though, there was no more blood.

The slice in his skin was livid instead. Staring indirectly at his own wide eyes in the mirror, Frederick watched the two white halves of the wound stitch themselves together millimeter by millimeter. He could have sworn his jaw dropped far enough to impact the edge of the sink.

"You've got to be joking."

As avoidant as he was of pain in any form, Frederick was far more enslaved to curiosity. He picked up the safety razor on the ledge in front of the mirror and, after a moment's hesitation, drew it up the side of his face dry.

"Ow!"

The patch of nicked hair follicles began to bleed, but after a couple of good splashes with water, Frederick couldn't tell the skin had ever been abraded at all. He looked from the hair-and-skin-clotted razor blades to his face in the mirror, then back again, and slowly...slowly...smiled.

Will's exhausted look vanished at once when he saw Frederick in the kitchen holding the knife.

Frederick pre-empted a move for his gun with, "This isn't for you!" He held the blade a few inches above his left wrist.

"Frederick," Will said. "We can talk about this. It doesn't have to be this way."

"What way?"

"You don't have to do this alone."

"I know!"

"Well, then, can you just put the knife down? Please?"

"In a minute," Frederick said. He hoped his voice didn't sound as manic to Will's ears as it did to his own. "I need you to see something."

"I've already seen all the blood I can handle for one night. More than one."

"This is different."

"I'll have to take you to a hospital. You won't be safe anymore."

"Will," Frederick said. "I've got this under control. I've, uh, had some practice...I've—you just have to see."

"Frederick," said Will. "Please."

"Just for once. For _once_. Trust me," Frederick said.

And he slashed his wrist.


End file.
